I didn't think MiG-3 had weak armament? No cannon but with 3* 12.7mm seemed to rip stuff up very quick to me.
Not the greatest turner but the height & speed at T5 were amazing for me it being my first altitude fighter.
I-210 has height & speed, better turning maybe but the 2* 20mm was a bit weak.
I-220 is a monster, one of if not outright my favourite plane in the game so far, height, speed & 4* cowling mounted 20mm in a sleek sexeh airframe.
La line was my first T5+ so the LaGG was amazingly fast & agile, lacks hitpower though. Is actually notably inferior to the Yak-1.
La-5 is great once you get the 3* 20mm, its a lot of alpha with good range & cowl mounting on an agile airframe & I've long been a fan of La-5 historically.
La-7 I had a real bad time with, seemed to be a bad intermediate stage.
La-9 is also great with 4* 23mm, pretty good speed & agility.
The first jet of the line La-160 is pretty odd looking with twin big cannon sticking out in front of the intake, overheat quick but do hit decently hard, reasonably quick & agile.
Yak-1 really agile but lacks speed, altitude & firepower.
Yak-1M improves speed & firepower, beautiful sleek airframe.
I was really looking forward to Yak-3 but ultimately found it disappointing, still lacks speed & altitude, has nice burst firepower but the 20mm 2ndaries overheat quicker than the hub 23mm so you can't use them to continue damage while cooling down the hub gun, airframe sprouts a bunch of not so pretty inlets.
Yak-15 has been something of a disappointment too, the twin 23mm gives iffy firepower, agility is really good as expected but the speed is disappointing, still poor altitude, it can work up to decent speeds but takes several boost/cooldown cycles to get there, pretty sure it averages significantly slower than La-9.
Yak-7 like the rest of the line lacks speed, agility & altitude but the hub 37mm hits hard & unlike the US 37mm it'll land where the MGs do.
Yak-9 you get lovely 45mm and sleek airframe but only a single 12.7mm 2ndary.
Yak-9u has a lot of the same downside as Yak-3 with 20mm 2ndaries, also gets same ugly inlets as Yak-3.
Careful investigation of the tree & order of progression across lines will net you a bunch of top guns/engines from stock.