Il-2 has newer games too which aren't as popular but look and sound great.
IL-2
Birds of Prey was an attempt to casualize the series and was a terrible example how
not to do it (the arcade mode is horrible and simulation mode even more because missions were balanced to be played with arcade realism), so it is a bad "casual" choice.
Cliffs of Dover and
Battle of Stalingrad are still buggy as frak and require a NASA supercomputer to run. And all these have way,
way fewer planes and missions/campaigns available than 1946, even unmodded 1946. Sure, they are so much prettier, but that's about it.
It's an imperfect world we live in.