Not if you have significantly lower chance to pen.
You will have double the amount of chances, sure, but these chances are low.
What has better odd of getting what you need?
Scoring 2 or better on D4 dice across 4 throws or scoring 4 or better 6 times in a row on D6 dice?
That is why RoF favors AI performance and armor favors AT performance.
For the setting that you assume - an isolated environment - this is wrong.
This whole discussion is pretty much arbitrary, as nobody uses ingame stats to say what they actually mean. So everyone just makes up their own scenario, because it was never defined what exactly you guys are discussing about.
To the point though:
In a fight between two vehicles, vehicle 1 getting a let's say 50% armor bonus, and vehicle 2 getting an equivalent ROF (note: not reload) bonus to compensate, the outcome of the fight should not change, right? A vehicle with half the pen chance, but double the ROF performs the same as a vehicle with normal pen chance and normal ROF, right? Wrong!
The ROF buff is more favored in vehicle vs vehicle combat due to the RNG nature of the game.
The chance of vehicle 2 to pen vehicle 1 will decrease, but still it has the chance to pen 4 times in a row. Due to the ROF buff, the time to kill will decrease in this scenario. Vehicle 1 will theoretically bounce more shots, but also get hit more often. As vehicle 1 does not get an ROF buff, the time to kill vehicle 2 will remain the same. The expectancy value remains the same, but the variance increases. Now you could argue that the variance increases similarly for lucky RNG and unlucky RNG, since CoH2 models a normal distribution, and that is correct. That's why our expectancy value stays the same. But unlucky RNG for vehicle 2 does not matter. We usually don't see these cases, since vehicle 2 is dead by then anyway.
You can visualize that better if we exaggerate in a similar scenario: vehicle 1 could take 10 shots, but will never bounce; vehicle 2 can only take one shot, but will bounce 90% of the enemy shots. Expectancy value for both vehicles is 10. But vehicle 1 will win most fights, since the it has 9 chances to kill vehicle 2 before it will be killed for sure. The 11th chance upwards does not count, as vehicle 1 will be dead anyway.
So, to sum it up:
ROF buff is good for AT AND AI. If ROF buff is equivalent to an armor buff (and both buffs actually matter), the ROF buff is favored also in vehicle combat.
There are other factors though, that do not favor ROF in an in-game scenario, and the most important one is alpha damage. It does not matter if you could shoot your enemy 10 times before he takes a second shot, if your enemy is smart enough to fall back after one shot and come back when reloaded. If you want to use your vehicles strength, then you MUST push into the enemy to best use the time while he is reloading. Obviously, this is often not the best option.
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