Another issue that ran and ran over at Targetware was the obtrusiveness of the window bars, they're simply unrealistic... Why ? because in reality they disappear, along with glass reflections..
Actually neither disappear in reality - but as you say they're out of optical focus and out of mental focus when flying.
There's limits to what rendering can do. Unlike the wavefronts of real light from a 3d scene which have phase, intensity and polarization information per wavelength, the screen can only offer you pixel intensity for three different colors, and the intensity range it can do is fairly limited.
So a screen won't ever give you focusing on different distances, it won't give you response to polarized glasses, it won't ever blind you with glare,...
Trying to mimick these with rendering is... tricky. To some degree you can, but it gets subjective.
The whole discussion is actually far from new, I've had it years ago on the mailing list with regard to mock-up glass reflections and dirt where I felt they're far overdone in some planes. Partially in response to that I wrote the glass shader, which handles that much closer to reality - most of the time scratches or fogging is very mild, unless the sun shines right through them, which is when they start to glare (try this with a car with frost on the windshield, and you'll know). Same with reflections - most of the time they're hardly noticeable, until they are (bright lit object in cockpit reflecting against night outside).
It's conceptually quite
possible to selectively fade bars etc. into alpha so that you can look through them, but personally I'd find this wildly unrealistic on the screen and much prefer to let my mental focus undo them. Same with scratches etc - some people really prefer them rather heavy on their planes, others just do not.
If you're into that kind of tricks, I guess you can do lots of them by learning how to configure effects and animations - I'm guessing we have most of what's needed ready to go. Personally, I believe perception compensations should be very mild if any in rendering and usually I consider them bug rather than feature.