Hull gunners are noticeably less efficient since they were "fixed", but honestly they are still brutal. Give me a tank on Commissars or Fallen Heroes, I'll rack up twice as many kills as the second most murderous player, and all I do is drive the tank and munch down potato chips.
I think the only things that were fixed were slower reaction times and shorter distance. Still, keep an infantry man in front of you for three seconds, at a distance of <100m you will score a single shot head shot.
There is absolutely no reason to ever have a human hull gunner as the AI is ten fold as efficient as a human player working the cramped field of view to aquire targets.
Meanwhile the turret gunner is swiveling around like crazy lobbing shells every which way, occasionally doing brilliant stuff like instantly aquiring a moving tank and one-shotting it, but much of the time it is just spinning the turret and making a lot of noise while the tank is taking serious fire from elsewhere.
The AI could use some tweaking to make their reaction time, awareness and accuracy more in line with a human player (preferable a little less able than a human player). In addition to that I would like to see a server side setting that makes AI gunners not fire at all. Forgive me if such a feature already exists, I think then it is up to server admins to activate it to make combined arms maps less frustrating for 60 of 64 players. While I fancy myself an excellent tanker, I do feel cheap about having my AI gunners racking up ridiculous kill counts that rival artillery in efficiency.
My playstyle is to push on to objectives while avoiding enemy tanks. Once there I start hosing down infantry while letting my team know the objective is covered but needs more men. The AI hull gunner makes this tactic stupidly effective.
