That's an opinion as valid as any. The weird thing about warscore/participation is that it favors casualties received rather than inflicted. While not intuitive from a gaming-perspective it does somewhat reflect the historical view. The USSR gained more political clout than the UK or US historically by pointing to their gruesome losses.
I previously made a topic about this:
Shouldn't inflicted casualties matter more than sustained casualties for the war score?
There may be something I'm missing, but doesn't it make sense for inflicted casualties to be more important than sustained casualties for war score? If you play as France and lost 500k manpower and only inflicted 30k manpower, you did pretty...forum.paradoxplaza.com
Italy used the "we lost a lot of men" argument in World War I as well, but nobody cared because they lost them due to Luigi Cadorna's incompetence.
The Soviet Union is in a similar situation, they lost that many troops mostly due to their incompetence and disregard for human lives. But at the same time, the Soviet Union inflicted most casualties to Nazi Germany.
At the end of the day, who has a bigger says at the peace talks depends on military power. Stalin may have used the "sustained casualities argument" to impress people, but the reason he got the deal he got had nothing to do with sustained casualities, and little to do with inflicted casualities. The reason he got the deal he got was because he had a huge army. This is also the reason why UK, US and France were the big 3 of the Entente. US barely had 117,000 sustained casualities in World War I.
The "sustained casualities argument" is a good rhetoric, the key word here is rhetoric. Talking about your sustained casualities is more impressive as far as making other people sympathize with you goes. But that doesn't mean you contributed the most to the war effort. Or that talking about sustained casualities will convince the right people. It may convince civilians who knew little about the inner workings of the war, but you will have a hard time convincing generals and politicians who've seen how the war went. Therefore the real life examples with Italy and USA in World War I as well as USSR in World War II.
The deals and peace-terms were beginning to flesh out well before the point where the Soviet military post-war strength were known though. The US position was largely governed by isolationism and a dislike for propping up any British Imperial claims. Both from the strategic and operational level as well as the political the US standpoint was quite clear. Military operational and strategic decisions should not be dictated by post-war politics. Roosevelts illness contributed to the US focus to just get the war over as soon as possible rather than to play any geopolitical game with Britain vs the Soviets. Truman and his Wilsonianism came too late to dent the common opinion of the Soviets "war score" (to use in-game terms).
Yes, you're right here. Negotiations on a post-war peace were conducted long before the end of the war and calculations of losses. In reality, there was no counter that would count the losses in real time and everyone saw them. In addition, Roosevelt had good cooperation with Stalin on the war in Japan and postwar colonial policy. So the "Score of Victory" should be revised and perhaps political events should be added, relations between countries that ultimately affect the final score. So what will DLC be dedicated to this? Like La Resistance, was dedicated to espionage.
I would say that some form of as-the-war-progresses "point" system for war-targets like in some of the other PDS-titles could work to improve the peace-conference system (like "claims" in Stellaris). You could add or remove war-goals (including allied secessions in terms of territory, laws etc) and count lend-lease cashback, strategic resources, nukes etc as the war progresses. If a nation then surrenders the peace-conference would already be prepared with a lot of input in terms of territory claimed, losses or gains etc.
