But they did that by sacrificing vehicle combat.
You say standing on a carrier when it was moving was glitchy, well try driving two jeeps next to each other in BF3 and try to figure out wtf is going on, they glitch together so much and then will randomly throw someone or both vehicles off to the side. The collision mechanics are absolutely atrocious. Then there's the stuff where if you are in a tank and moving forward using sprint and take a tank shell to the front it does double damage. It's even worse with the jets and helicopters, you could fly by a helicopter in your view really close but not actually hit and be on the other side of him on your screen then the game decides you did hit them sort of and you both get tossed around in an extremely unrealistic way.
Then consider how all the vehicles are virtually identical to the other sides vehicles. And almost all the maps have equal numbers of vehicles (conquest), they don't try to do any sort of complex interesting balancing they just make it all the same and call it good.
Tank combat in BF1942 was much more interesting because you could roll out with a panzer which was superior to the sherman, but then run into a m10 that ruins your day in a straight fight. The aircraft in BF1942 were vastly different from each other which made fights much more dynamic. For example the corsair versus zero engagements, in high speed turns the corsair could turn much faster than the zero, but it scrubs a lot of speed doing it so during the first moments of the engagement the corsair was dominant, but as the fight progressed the zero which had better cornering abilities at low speed became dominant. So when you flew the corsair you developed hit and run tactics to highlight your aircrafts abilities, and with the zero you learned to keep them from taking you out in the initial engagement and not lose track of them when they try to get away.
Now in the air combat it doesn't matter whether you have the russian or the american jet (unless it's the pos f35) you do the exact same thing as each other because they are essentially identical in performance.