I don't feel it's that useless. You will find me at one whenever I'm Brit on Crete, because I actually like them. It's true, it does not make superior damage, but I killed some Ju52 or Stukas which were trying to get height and were therefore slow. But even at normal flight you can damage them enough that they have to turn away and fly back to base or to make it easier for the Bofors guys to finish em off.
The traverse change is indeed nice. You can hold off infantry coming from the beach towards Chania pretty succesfully. Furhtermore there is less of a "dead angle" where you can't hit the planes because they are right above you. I'm fine with it and it's not meant to be a superior AA weapon. Not everything in the game needs to be a generally powerful tool. But yea, I see what you are thinking. When all other weapons got hi indicators, why should it not have one too ? So yea, I agree to add them.
Relating the hit indicators: I personally don't care if there are hit indicators or not. Played a FlH tournament without them and it was nice too. Imo, you get used to it very fast. Non existing hit indicators are really nice when flying a plane imo, feels a lot better in dogfights. But sometimes it's nice to know if you hit the long range shot and to know if he got injured or you simply missed him. I'm indifferent about that, but because most people might not like them to be removed, it's probably better to keep them.