SwingKid, I realy applaude your idea of having only a single flyable plane and a small theater in the initial release. To limit the scope of the sim in order to provide a more complete and coherent product with a limited development budged is in my opinion very important. You even go so far to limit a planes capabilitys/mission profile ( F-16 with LANTIRN but no HTS ) in the initial release, wich I find realy a great idea. This means more resources on mission specific AI routines, procedures, comms and other mission specific features to give a mission profile justice and make it complete, before add another one. This is IMO one of the biggest problems of Lock On, there are so many planes with so many different missions that none of them is done right ( no FAC or team A-G tactics for A-10, no GCI for MiG-29/Su-27, no 'mutual support' doctrine for F-15C, almost no Su-25 specific targets etc. ). Lock On tried to be so much and in the end failed to be superior pretty much everywhere except graphics and FM. So the right way for the future can only be to narrow down the scope of the initial sim to the fewest possible, use the resources to make a coherent product and start to expand the scope with follow up products.
But I don't think that Cyprus would be a wise starting point for a sim. For this the theater is simply too small. There are about 130 km between the two most distant airbases. I don't see how an airwar with SAMs could be fought on such a small space. The only way I could imagine Cyprus alone as a theater would be if one side would operate completly from the outside of the map ( wouldn't Greece do that anyway ? ). But one side without airbases is very bad for gameplay, as our current Black Sea map shows quite well.
It seems SwingKid has selected Cyprus also for the fact that both sides have F-16s in their inventory. Personaly I don't know why both sides must have a flyable plane at all. As a single player you can only fly for one side a time anyway, and while it would be nice to play a campaign from differert sides, I don't see a real need to have that feature. Pretty much every study sim in the past featured a single flyable plane from a single side and that worked fine everytime. The need to have both sides flyable seems to come manly from the online-dogfight fraction, wich is so small that it shouldn't have much weight in the selection of the scope of the next sim. The vast majority are single players and for those only one flyable side should be suffisent ( also for the coop MP folks ).