So personally I think when making a game you need to come up with rules that "play good", just as films try to "look good". If you want to achieve a particular style of combat (for example the combat seen in the films) then you need to tune your rules to achieve that kind of combat. The speed and acceleration you need to achieve this may be wildly different than what you can observe in the films.
I also think getting combat to look exactly like it does in the films may be impossible. A real human pilot flying according to the rules that are apparent in the Star Wars films would probably have used very different tactics. Real people are incredibly good at exploiting the rules of the game to their advantage. Pilots in films however are flying based on what looks cool in a movie, not based on what was actually a good tactic. In other words the combat in the films may well not look like any real combat ever would. It's likely the best that's achievable in a game is having combat that is "kind of similar" to what we see in the films.
Yes, that's all true. I don't think anyone really disagrees with that either, people just like different approaches towards more or less the same goal.
Frankly, as someone who plays with what dogfighting test missions we have usually several times every day, I think what we have now is pretty darn good in the "looks and feels like in the films" respect. There's several little details and missing features which still get in the way a bit, but the only bigger problem perhaps in need of a clever solution is the circling fights. They don't fly in circles in SW (with the exception of the falcon and those two interceptors
), but of course that's what happens all the time in-game. However, it's not necessarily something that would need to be fixed by tweaking the flight mechanics themselves; there should be other ways to dissuade a pilot from trying to shrug someone off their tail by simply doing steep turns and circles.
For example, currently in FotG you can fly as slow as you like, but it's usually suicide if there's a chance that someone could start shooting at you. So that's an incredibly simple and natural gameplay solution (whether intentional or not) to the problem of things "not looking like in the films" as far as speed is concerned. No one wants to get killed so they tend to keep their speed high just like in the films. So, my point is that making things look and feel like in the films while having interesting gameplay is not just about limiting what each ship
can do, it's just as much about encouraging the "right" kind of actions and discouraging the "wrong" kind of actions, even if the player could do anything they like. In your Star Trek mod example, I don't see the problem as being the fact that impulse power was replicated exactly, but instead the fact that they didn't make sure that it could not be abused, which they could have done by putting in some extra rules which would have prevented it and which wouldn't have (seriously) contradicted canon either.
So what I'm trying to say with all this is that if you first make the rules conform to the movies as much as possible and then realize that the resulting gameplay doesn't end up looking like what you see in the movies, it doesn't mean that you need to change those basic rules to fix the gameplay. You also have the option of adding new rules which don't eliminate or change the core rules as such, but instead just add exceptions and limitations to them in order to prevent players from abusing them.
And as brandx0 said, the point isn't to use canon statistics just for the sake of accuracy of the stats themselves, but instead in order to recreate the right look and feel. And as I said, the numbers are just half of what makes the right look and feel; the other part is actually making the "right" actions sensible from a gameplay point of view and the "wrong" ones less so. Of course that's probably the harder part, but I'm pretty confident.
