I have fond memories of playing Aces High and Fighter Ace as a kid. I think I even played a two-week free trial of Aces High II when it launched, but didn’t have the free time to justify paying a subscription by then. I have a lot of nostalgia for those games, and they were truly awesome at the time, playing on a Pentium II machine with Windows 98 over a 56K modem or ISDN connection. Being able to actually fight in a large scale battle was really awesome, and the huge array of planes and ground vehicles was staggering.
I look back and remember how amazing it was, I think because it was the first time I’d seen anything like that. Nostalgia is a powerful thing; thanks for bringing back fond memories of a teenage boy sneaking down to the den where the family computer was and starting to download Aces High, hoping it would finish overnight before my Dad saw it and asked what I was tying up the phone line for!
I think I got a mini-CD (remember those? Haha, now I don’t even have a disk drive in any PC in my entire house!) with Aces High on it one year at Oshkosh (1998?) and a free trial period. I couldn’t wait to get home from the camping trip at the airshow to install it. I think I managed to snag three of them over the course of the airventure… 
Now, DCS (and IL2 when I get an occasional WWII urge) fulfill this role for me, especially because I can pick them up and put them down for weeks (or sometimes months, depending on how life goes) at a time without feeling guilty for paying a monthly fee.
I’ll tell you what I wish had VR support, and that’s IL2: Cliffs of Dover. The level of systems modeling, clickable cockpit and damage modeling (both visual and physics) were head and shoulders above IL2:BoX, IMHO. But once I went VR, it was impossible to go back.
Well said, I agree completely.