It is not a sandbox as long as you have marked teams and any missions. But again I do not wont to discus here what a sandbox really is.
You guys seams ware not close to a real war or some emergency situation. You cold survive, even fight whit one leg or arm gone. Tv documentaries are sponsored by arm manufacturers and are not that real, they use that as adds to sell weapons, do not belive to anything they say. I hit the guys from from couple of km in the leg and hi is dead, I do not think that is fair. Also those bluets go quite in a strait line, do not drop to much on a long distances.
As for the killing the heli pilot, for example if heli or some armored vehicle shots at the truck full of players they got all the kills. I know that this is not important for you guys who play Coop or some missions, but in HOLD or TDM this is important, as you get cash as much as you kill, and whit that cash you buy weapons every time you get killed. For example if I kill just one guy I will not have money to buy my favorite weapon.
What is interested is that I played couple of months ago some other game, also wrote some text, small critics on some aspect of the game, and I got the same replay as here, this is not the game for you, you do not understand the big idea behind the game :))))
The big idea is to have fun, but there are to many FAN-BOYS who have Black&WHite screens, who get in panic every time anyone says that there is something wrong whit the game they love so much. It is not the graphic or cool weapons or cool sound that makes a game great. It is the over all gameplay, it needs to be balanced an fun to play. They did god job whit this game, but I think that there is still room for improvements.
In ARMA 2 if I hit the guy in a leg hi cold not get up, if I hit him in the arm hi cold not aim strait, they already have a system built for that, not shore why did they not implement that here.