Plus not being pilot, I have no seat of the pants feel for the flight models like you all do. In a way, I guess that might be a blessing. 
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Omg some of the boxes are upside down… twitch
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They are the ones I purchased from The Flight Sim Shop, which is in Australia.
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Totally makes sense… 
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With a plethora of free payware quality scenery, including that which is orthophoto derrieved, a mostly superior flight model, a more modern interface, and excellent VR support, it’s hard not to want to place all of your chips onto an X-Plane hand. But for a couple of major complaints and the fact that there are some classes of aircraft that just can’t be found outside of P3D/FSX, count me in.
A very frustrating issue is that updates to X-Plane often break a bunch of third party developer’s aircraft, rendering them more or less unflyable. That is, until either said developers or the community get around to fixing them. It’s a mystery as to whether developers are going down a risky path, if Austin and company fail to provide developers with sufficient warning, or if XP is so bull-headed that they press on regardless of collateral damage. Things like turbo-props that hot start regardless of engine control settings, ground handling that throws the aircraft sideways at exactly 40 mph, aircraft getting sucked to the tarmac the moment that they should be entering ground effect, or glide ratios that cause taildraggers to behave like sailplanes. Since the default aircraft rarely behave this way, the process seems often uncoordinated and unorganized.
Sometimes the end result is beneficial to developers and the community, like Laminar Research’s G1000 development reaching the point that the community mostly prefered it over third party developed solutions. That relieved plane builders from spending valuable resources on developing their own Garmin panels.
But mostly, it porks a bunch of your favorite aircraft, leaving little choice but to return to P3D/FSX if you wanted to fly something similar. For this reason, I’ve killed off my XP11 beta branch.
And then there’s ATC. I really should be able to interact with them without filing a flight plan, just as I would IRL. For instance, if I am flying KGSP to KPDK VFR, I would normally listen to ATIS about 15 miles out, then check in with the tower at 10 miles. Even with recent improvements, it’s a frustrating mess which needs a rewrite.
On the other hand, being able to easily fix broken aircraft in planmaker or a text editor is a blessing, not that I could manage this without some help. The ASDG Super Cub is a good example of a great airplane that was ruined by recent changes in X-Plane’s FDM, placed on long term hold by the dev due to a lack of resources, but rescued by a community member (fix here). That aircraft is fantastic now!
Want to fly a study level military or business jet? You will need to be in a different sim.
So, while I tend to do most of my civilian flying in X-Plane and even with some recent momentum from developers like Orbx, RealityXP, and JustFlight, IMHO the scale remains pretty even.
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One good thing about not taking the X-Plane lunge…it takes me half the time that it previously did, to get through a new issue of PCPilot. I think half the reviews were for X-Plane products. Of course Chris Frishmuth’s Aerosoft’s DC-8 (for FSX) and PG Map (for DCS) reviews were the highlights of this issue…why isn’t he paid more?! 
(@BeachAV8R, $20 deposit in my PayPal will suffice) 
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I’m just starting to dip my toe into what I’m quickly discovering is a terrifyingly deep and wide pool, but I like the feel of X-Plane starting out way more than I did Fsx (insert @BeachAV8R rant about chasing balloons), not to mention all the issues I keep having with compatibility issues and dealing with 15 year old software.
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All I need to get down this rabbit hole would be to buy some additional disc space. Sure hope I can keep holding out.
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You and me both.
I tilted toward XP because of helicopters simulation. By default XP platform is much beter in this regard than FSX platform.
By default I mean that developers has much easier job to provide good heli simulation in XP.
If you read helisimer web page reviews you know that helos on FSX platform strugles :
… I welcome their [MP Design Studio] effort, but I wonder if it’s worth add features to a helicopter, that make it behave weirdly, just for the sake of saying they are present. I’d rather have them not add these characteristics and just accept the shortcomings of the sim. Milviz, CeraSim and Nemeth Designs all do it and people simply accept the fact that, if they are flying their favorite helicopters in P3D, they are making a trade-off. …
Here I found also very good coment in regards to heli siming on FSX. I think the guy is right on spot :
…This is an all around fun chopper. It isn’t perfection, but it is well done. We die hard simmers have to put-up with developers’ excuses about how MSFX has built in limitations and they can only do so much. I keep thinking, ‘You’re software writers, write programs that expand MSFX platform limits’. I’ve always suspected this excuse to be a cost saver, a cop-out or a cover for their own limitations. …
But then we come to what @chipwich has writen, and I agree. There are particular aircrafts/helos that just cant be found outside of FSX platform.
Still today the available plane set is shorter on XP side.
Helo simming in FSX is, IMHO definitely a love-hate issue. For me, there are only two helo that havecrackecd through FSX’s engine helo limitations; Dodo Sim’s B206 and MILVIZs Hughes 500. Of the two, I think Dodo Sim’s product is superior.
Nemeth Design’s and Cera Sims’ helos, while fun to fly (I have a virtual hangar full), are have really not gone beyond the FSX engine limitations.
Quite frankly I think the MS decision to kill the line was inevitable and that the reason had been staring us in the face for years. The default installation of most MSFS versions put it under “Microsoft Games”.
Is any advanced PC flight simulator a game to most of us? It never has been so to me. A hobby? Yes. A game? No. However, to those who made business decisions at MS, MSFS was a game…and really, who cares if you cut another game from your line of products.
At least that’s the way I see it.
Oh, thank you for reminding me. While we’re on this, I’m still bitter towards Microsoft for the whole “Flight” debacle a few years ago. But that’s an entirely separate rant altogether (insert @BeachAV8R’sreview of Microsoft Flight from 6 years ago).
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Yeah. Flight and DTG’s latest try are just proof positive that you MUST ship a product with lots of content on Day 1. These sims aren’t like Arma where the users can quickly fill in the gaps and make fun stuff to play…it takes a long time to ramp up gameplay type content for flight sims.
In my perfect world, my very complex sims will have very good gameplay too. DCS World is pretty good at that and to some extend P3D with Air Hauler is that way too. I’m really, really hopeful that CAP 2 can reach that state soon. I’ve been a bit hands off on that sim hoping I’d revisit it and find just a huge leap ahead at some point.
Interesting mod that a user created for Air Hauler for X-Plane (the original Air Hauler 1) that allows you to add your own aircraft parameters to the Air Hauler database.
“Is known that Air Hauler works well with XP11 except the import of your aircraft to his database. You are stucked to use non-corresponding aircraft between AH and your XP. After some tests, I developed a software that now you can add new aircraft with the required parameters on the AH.”
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An intersting point. Let me see if I understand it correctly. I considered Flightsimming my hobby, not a game. So were is the gameplay aspect?
Using the analogy of model trains…if that were my hobby, I would purchase different model trains and buy track and other things. I’d put a put piece of plywood on a unused ping-pong table, lay the tracks and build scenery. As time when by I’d get more track and bigger sheets of plywood. All-in-all I’d spend a bunch of time researching trains to buy and building better and better scenery.
But I wouldn’t do any of that if I didn’t enjoy putting on my engineer’s hat and send the trains around the track every now and then.
The building things for the trains/flight sims is the hobby part. Running the trains/flying the airplanes is the gameplay part?
It can mean different things for different people. Diversity.
Why draw a line? Where is the line…?
I clearly like building stuff for my flightsim hobby.
I also like to fly virtual aircraft.
I like to fly virtual missions in my virtual aircaft, in the very physical simulator that I built.
It’s all part of the hobby…or game. 
The train analogy is good but only to a point. Hobbies like RC and modeling scratch a creative itch. The flight sim hobby does not (unless you are in to mission creation, hardware design or 3rd party content development). Flight siming as a recreation doesn’t have many equivalents.
So I agree with Beach. I want to be pulled into the world I paid for. I find that I am increasingly less able to find a reason to dive in without a good reason. So far, the greatest reason in my enthusiast’s life to dive in day after day has been the Falcon dynamic campaign. A little lower on the inticement scale has been the several very good DCS MP servers. Slightly lower still is the new IL2 career system.
Well, I’m an engineer…we like lines. 
Seriously, no line…definitely a grey area…a spectrum as it were.
That said, I think the the bean-counters at MS definitely saw a line. 
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That they did…
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