Just my opinion, maybe I'm wrong...
The reson you're always the good guys is that most people wanna be heros. Almost everyone dislikes a lot about themselves in real life, and they want want to achieve something in the game. If you're on the loosing side, you'd either have to loose the war, which would be very frustrating, I can'T imagine winning a game and still loosing a war. Or you could make the loosers in real life win, but that would be historical incorrect. I think that's why you're always the "good guys". But i also think "good guys" is a bad term for it, because "the winners write history", as captian picard in Start Trek, Next Generation said once. Maybe I should say: That's why you're always on the winners' side.
I think what could be done in regards to realsim is different difficulties, easy, medium, and realistic. I think Splinter Cell does that. I like it that way. I totally agree with you, that it's not realistic at all how much players can take, but changing that and still make them able to win would be very hard. You can't be a hero if there's 10 enemies and you know you'll die from 4 bullets.

Anyways, having said that I think the crosshair, shooting and effeckts look very nice so far. For a first game, that's amazing!! I remember my first game... I used something that acctually looked sort of like guns ... and the level was the worst level I've seen in human history...^^ this is really good. I won't say anything about the level because you said it would still be changed

Micha