This game is a joke

[Strider]

I've had two PBEM opponents for about as long as the patch for it came out. We've all got an understanding that the game isn't historical to the point where the IJN can't win. With the four different Victory conditions, there's a lot of room for different things to happen. We've had games end with the time victory kicking in, anywhere from a couple of months to almost a year later. We take that into account while we're playing.
As far as manually targeting ships with planes, the design decision was that planes didn't always ID the correct targets. And adding in that function would have lengthened the game time, which is one of the points of the way the game is designed. It's not designed to take more than a couple of hours or so to play.
No game is to everyone's liking.