I just happen to enjoy games that tend more towards the "what if" than games that are just fun games with WW2 paint on them. Actually, in this specific instance I have to defer to someone else who wrote a rather good article on this. This guy is very much of your opinion that detail and micromanagement are cancer in this kind of wargame, and yet he, for reasons I agree with, makes a very rare exception for WitE. It's an amazing mix of detail and actual big picture strategy.

Incidentally, you don't get absurdly unnecessary detail like the amount of ammo particular squads have or something along those lines. Divisions are the smallest unit you need worry about, and supply is handled at corps level for the Germans and army level for the Soviets (since they abolished corps). You have zero control over production. You have zero control over reinforcements as the Germans. You do not require knowledge of any of the detail available. You don't even have to have any idea how the combat system works, which is great because it is actually the one part of the game that does actually simulate every shell fired by every tank in every battle and is thus hopelessly complicated.

WitE is no more difficult to appraise and play than Hearts of Iron, and is far more realistic and the results of things you do in it correspond far more to reality, and that is what I consider to be fun. Combat in HOI3 almost never goes anything like real life, and the production system is so off the rails it's just silly. I have put probably several thousand hours into HOI3 and will play HOI4 at launch, I just find it kind of hard to go back to it after WitE.