WWII should not be boring, particularly since it's inevitably going to go differently when the player is involved.
I really think this is the fault of the AI, though.
Yeah, some of the mechanics are goofy at times. I'm not really satisfied with Vichy and Case Anton, for example (and I've never really liked Vichy in any HOI). I think synthetic plants are both overpowered
and pointlessly combined into one thing when they should be separate. And I think some general trait, general staff, and division composition combinations are bordering on Monty Python (CAV/SPART formations, for example).
But when you say the war is boring and has no soul, I don't see that as coming from the mechanics. It's because the AI, while better, is not good enough to give a human a compelling game. Even as I say this, I know there are plenty of players who turn the difficulty down with the new lower difficulties, but for old grognards, having Rommel drive from Kiel to Paris in 28 days is considered a lackluster performance against the AI. (Someone in this community posted a guide on breaking the Maginot Line in a few days and with only 5,000 casualties, so draw your own conclusions).
This is really thrown into relief by the MP group I play with. We've had some games where things were not as exciting (like the time I lost as the Soviets when Germany invaded in 1940 with a bunch of LARM and basically drove to Moscow), but we've had some damn fun games that were real nail biters. I will share my favorite story to illustrate how the game is far more compelling when your opponents are at your level of competence.
It is late 1942. The Italians have been pushed out of Libya, Sicily is occupied, and southern Italy (all the way to Rome) is occupied as well. The German army is stuck at the Riga-Kiev river line, not having made it to Vitebsk or Smolensk, despite brutal fighting in the gap. Supply problems for Germany mean that even if Germany wanted to send more troops to the eastern front, she can't. The good news is that Franco joined the Axis, so Gibraltar is held by the Axis, closing that end of the Mediterranean. The war is at a stalemate, and the Axis position will continue to worsen as the US continues to expand her economy.
So, I decide to break the stalemate. I can't apply more pressure to the Soviets, and I can't liberate Rome through direct action due to the number of US and British divisions sitting in the mountains of Italy. But I notice that the Allies are really thin in Casablanca and Algeria.
And the Allies are not patrolling the Atlantic coast of Morocco because they chased away my submarines. That leads Germany and Italy to plan a joint operation.
Italy, with some German lend-lease, launches an Axis Torch landing in Morocco. While this is going on, Guderian is given command of a panzer army, and invades Turkey. The goal is that the Axis Torch landing will be a distraction that causes the Allies to send reinforcements west before they realize that Germany will get across the straits near Istanbul.
Germany makes provisions to station forces in eastern Turkey to stall an obvious Soviet reprisal, but Guderian's tanks make a mad dash through Turkey to the Suez with little resistance. Meanwhile, it turns out the Allies were stretched even thinner than the Axis thought: aside from meager resistance in Casablanca,
the Italians drive from Casablanca to Tunis with barely any opposition. The distraction turned into a serious offensive that threatened to undermine the entire Allied position.
Long story short: Guderian reaches the Suez, but doesn't get across. This isn't a problem, though, because the Germans control the east bank of the Suez, sealing it. The Italians eventually overextend and get destroyed, but it takes months. And best of all, the Allied forces in Italy abandon their positions and retreat to Sicily; they can't draw supply anymore with both Gibraltar and the Suez closed. And the Soviets are forced to shift an entire panzer army of their own to the Caucuses because now the Germans are in eastern Anatolia. Rome is saved, Italy is in a far more secure position, and the Allies are still committed to holding Egypt and Sicily, so they can't funnel those troops to a possible Overlord, or German forces will seize Cairo.
We still lost the war in the end (IIRC, the Luftwaffe finally died a horrible death as the Allies bombed the synthetic plants, leaving me bereft of air cover when Overlord started
backed up by a nuclear strike on Germany), but it was great fun. You never see a reversal like that with a semi-competent human versus the AI. A human UK or USA would have finished off Italy and marched to Berlin via Vienna against an AI. But against real opponents, with rules that you can live with, there's feints, unexpected actions, psychological warfare, gambits, and exploitation of mistakes (like the one time the British player decided to leave a single division in the British Isles in 1940, resulting in a game where the US spent most of its time defending California, Utah, and New Mexico after the Italians and Japanese met up in Delhi).
