Nice find! I've long advocated for PIP for aircraft. Battlefield games should not just be a copy pasta with different textures to reflect the time period. The era should have some significant effects on how the game operates. Does PIP make sense for WW1 and WW2? No, and those games should reflect that and be heavily focused on traditional methods of aiming. Conversely though, does it make sense for a game set in 2042 to not have predictive aiming? Hell no!
This isn't about "muh immersion" but about symmetry, respecting the theme of the game and preventing jarring disconnects from expectations.
I can only speculate but maybe it was done for balance reasons and if so I feel that is unfortunate because you can always balance the game in reaction to predictive aiming. This is no insurmountable task.
The other culprit could be the notorious UI issues that Frostbite 3 has. Maybe there's a bizarre performance hit when they try to implement it with 128 players. I've always wondered if that is why they nerfed the rangefinders on vehicles to just 100m a few patches back. Never made sense why they'd do that unless there was some performance savings to be made from not having to produce those calcs beyond 100m. Not like I ever heard a complaint about vehicle range finders being OP.
