Also, ME does not store data between missions and does not know what aircraft you have assigned to your squad pilots before.
Which is fine, if ME could assign planes by rank each time, because it's not persistent, it would assign same planes to the same pilot every time, unless someone got promoted. We would just have the wrong list on the pre-flight screen in WOFF, but after ME is done with it the correct planes would be distributed to the correct ranks and flown that way in the mission itself. I can live with that. I'm just trying to get away from manual assignment and have the computer sort it out. This could be a checkbox so it happens automatically every time you open ME. If the checkbox is off, you can assign the planes from a dropdown list and only the planes to the pilots you choose or leave it as is. This way you would accommodate people who want either all planes reassigned per rank (checkbox on), or just individual pilots (checkbox off), or leave it alone for those who want to play it the way WOFF intended it.