I've more or less banged on about the same things since my award-winning post in August. And yes, I'm still a RBR fanboy and immensely proud of it and the list represents features I learned to take for granted as a proud RBR fanboy. The following points are sorted by priority (as I see it).
1) The damage model. Visually it's more than satisfying right now, in fact it's great, but the often suggested "Hardcore damage option" is necessary. Simple as that.
2) Almost everything about how the car recovery is designed baffles me endlessly. Firstly, I fail to see the need for that countdown timer. What is it they are trying to achieve with that? And I wonder what exactly they then tried to achieve with changing it from 10 to 15 seconds? It's still a bad idea. Before they made the decision, the devs were aware how gamers found the timer frustrating so they had another solution on the table that wouldn't involve the timer at all. Well, that didn't happen. Secondly, and not surprisingly considering the time limit in place, the time penalties to accompany the timer for either the intentional car recovery or the automatic one don't make any sense whatsoever.
I guess it was unrealistic to expect them to discard the automatic recovery like many were asking for right from the start. I'd have preferred some old-fashioned walls instead of "hard resets" to limit the playing area because now with automatic recovery you can get away with some massive mistakes without any car damage. Like in Greece you can go too wide and go off a cliff to face certain death only for the automatic recovery then to give a helping hand mid-air. Mind you, when I tested this the other day, I was probably going off on purpose in places where no-one would realistically go off. So take this with a pinch of salt.
3) The service park is not only bloody awful but utterly useless as well. The only positive thing in place is the time penalty, such a shame I'll never end up getting one, as it's just crew recommendation for me and off I go. (And I hate the fact that I would have to do some grinding in career mode to be able to repair anything in a meaningful way.) Also the lack of freedom in scheduling them should be looked at (I understand that these days a league promoter can set a fixed interval to lengthen the loops from the usual two stages and while it is better than nothing, I don't think that's good enough).
4) The tyre selection (no tyre wear, so no tyre selection is the official explanation and it is a good excuse as such, I must admit). Not easy to implement by any means and some say it wouldn't be worth it because of the length of the stages, but I'm not necessarily buying that one because surely if you can create rallys with decent amount of kilometres before each service, a promoter could play with this to spice up things a little, not to a mind-blowing degree but still. (One thing I'm concerned about is that undeniably, as things stand, in Greece and Wales this wouldn't make any difference because of the lack of certain weather conditions.)
