OK, the only issue I have with this is that it is no longer obvious which way the aircraft are heading. As my PC really struggles with anything other than 'Minimum' for the Network traffic and even with the Network refresh rate set at 30 seconds, you have to watch carefully to see the flow of Network traffic. I'm not getting any trail at all from Network traffic either, only from the Hardware traffic.
If I set Network to 'Medium' my PC more or less stops dead and the 3D view is unusable.
Personally, I'd like to see the aeroplane symbols return - either that, or a way of reducing the PC loading that allows me to display 2D network symbols.
If the Network aircraft globes created a trail, that would help.
That actually was the reason we removed the aircraft icons. The icon never indicated direction, only climb, level and descend (the icon always pointed either left level, left up and left down). Having 2D icons with rotation is something that I tried implementing but it was often very confusing since they 'billboard' to the camera and rotation looks very odd. I'm still trying to find a good way to show direction with a 2D icon.
The 'medium' setting basically takes a 2D icon and lays it flat (parallel to the earth surface) and rotates it based on the aircraft heading. If you try choosing 'medium' for both hardware and network, then set 'Default number of Aircraft Trail Points' to 0, that might be usable on your system (it will only load icons w/o trails). This is a little more cpu intensive than the sphere icons, but not too much.
Unfortunately the network sphere's with 'minimum' setting selected won't show the trails. We should probably add this as an option in the next version.