The problem with serving a niche community is it doesn't change the amount of effort you have to put into the game. A really good subsim is going to be just as much work as MW3, and the potential profit is tiny by comparison.
As to the people who are saying "Ubisoft only wants money", well... of course. It's not a charity. Of course the company is going to put its efforts into the most financially promising projects. The guy who wrote Minecraft is a billionaire now (no exaggeration), and nobody is going to make that kind of money serving the tiny community of hard core subsimmers. Personally I'm surprised SH5 got made at all, and it doesn't surprise me they cut corners.
There are only two ways I can see getting a next generation sim - either somebody with a lot of online charisma gets an open-source project going and keeps it alive until the first stable release, or a company like Ubi releases the code for an older game like SH3 or SH4. Come to think of it, it wouldn't hurt them financially to release the SH5 code, and that might be a better starting point.
SHO isn't going to be a hard core sim. It can't be. It might be a fun game of the more casual variety, but the people who haunt this forum aren't going to like it.
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