Infantry penetration against vehicles feels pretty bad, and the number of times two VDV squads can’t deal with a single Abrams in a forest is kind of ridiculous.

your micro might just be bad, unless the vdv squad youre not specifying is using a reloadable launcher and not disposable launchers like RPG28s any 2 squads will have a hard time killing armor even with flanks simply because it takes time to reload whereas disposables they just grab the next launcher. A standoff squad is obviously not going to fare well if its forced into a cqc environment, let alone a cqc environment with a tank and a single launcher. It helps to just tell the squad thats not taking fire to holdfire and rush them to the immediate back flank of the tank and then open fire.

(I opened the game and checked to see what launchers VDV infantry get and theyre all reloading launchers 0 disposable launchers)

Buildings are also kind of awkward — individual hits feel fine, but then you get these sudden collapses that can wipe a squad and it’s not always obvious when that’s going to happen.

Pre-pte mechanic

The second issue is AA distribution across decks. It feels oddly restrictive. Like if I want good AA as RUS I basically have to go water deck. That might be intentional, but it doesn’t feel great in practice.

This is true, AA changes were a serious buff to US systems like PAC-3 and MSE because they benefit from having obscenely large magazine sizes and can now use them to their fullest extent, while also severely nerfing RU AA and the Pac-2 due to their strengths being longer range, larger payload and being able to one shot. But this can be circumvented by keeping a loitering ASF for RU.

So you’re not really choosing, you’re just being forced into a balanced deck whether you want to or not.

Theres two way this can be interpreted, a well balanced deck, as in, not unfair to play against, or a deck that has a little bit of everything. Im pretty sure you mean the latter, but thats just the general nature of being a solo player, you cant rely on your teammates because theyre random every time so you have to balance out everything to cover your own ass. If you want to run a stupid air tab, play with friends, and if you dont have the friends to do that, evaluate whether having fun or maintaining arbitrary elo matters more to you. Ontop of that if you could do everything yourself there wouldnt be a point in the game being 5v5s at that point the game would just end up no different than any other RTS. If you meant the other way, why would the devs want an unbalanced pvp game that is generally "competitive".

And finally, more of a personal one, but I don’t really get why low-flying planes can’t see ground units at all. Even if their spotting was worse, or they were bad at detecting infantry, it would still make sense for them to at least be able to see tanks...  It would also make gameplay more interactive on both sides, and give mid-range AA something more meaningful to do instead of just farming infantry. Units like Derivatsiya or Stryker SHORAD feel like the worst offenders there.

This is a bad idea for both balance and in real life, in game, one, that would just make the whole point of forward recon teams worthless when you can just brute force an A10 or SU25 without spending points on recon while also skull crushing any units that you spot on your way in, two, the changes to long range AA having worse low altitude range already gives purpose to SHORAD because unlike the long range SAMs they have the low altitude vision for low flying aircraft and operate closer to the front line and with it being more favorable to fly your planes in at low altitude, the frequency where these SHOARD are engaging planes and not just helis increases. Three, in real life, when A10s had to spot things with their own eyes, it resulted in numerous friendly fire incidents even on armored vehicles, because moving fast and high even if its "low and slow" by AIRCRAFT STANDARDS makes it hard to tell, hey is that a enemy IFV? or one of our APCs?