My thoughts were:
This game has nothing to do with the First World War. (Except for the planes that were kind of like these)
If it's a game, the rules you mentioned are widely accepted as a means to let everyone have fun playing.
The "Great" war was not great and chivalry was a rarity.
Mostly pilots snuck up on eachother and picked out an almost defenceless spotter plane, or a slower bomber. They were the strategicly important targets, and tháts how the aces got such scores.
Parachutes were almost non existent and later rarely issued, because they were presumed to encourage cowardly jumping out when an enemy plane approached. Handguns were only given to pilots for the single reason to prevent them from burning alive while going down and crashing anyway.
So let's just play the game, and not pick on others to pad our stats by saying "I'm a bomber escort, so that's why I dropped" and lame excuses like that. Just try to play fair, and gain respect thát way.
So I think you are absolutely right, although not "officially".