In some ways, sure. But does it make sense to use a lot of resources to produce a huge, complicated liason plane rather than painting Piper Cubs green and enlarging the windshields? The Storch has nine linkages between the stick and the elevator; the Cub has a cable. The Storch was hard to fly and needed a skilled pilot who could otherwise have been in fighters; the Cubs could be flown by guys who had washed out of flight school. And which one do you want to fix in a hurry in a desert or snowstorm? It was (among other things) overengineered machinery like this that lost the Germans the war. Great designs that were too expensive and complex for mass production and tricky to maintain in the field. The Russians made simple, cheap planes (like the Yak 3, with plywood wing skins), but they made a lot of them. Sometimes being a step ahead is not an advantage.