Your point makes sense but you forget an important factor:
Many young ones want to live the deeds of their fabled forebears. Their grandfathers who fought Great Patriottic wars. It is one of the reasons sims survived in .ru, as that is a strong draw for the youngsters over there. Still, there’s that drive among kids in the west. Read or watch about the glories of midway, the 8th air force, etc. Games allow them to live part of those stories.
I agree completely. Learning how to operate the machine is part of the experience. Seeing the scale of the terrain is another part. Learning how to “put the thing on the thing” is vital. Those are all done extremely well currently. What I believe to be missing in all these sims (except BMS) is the game. One that gives the player a visceral idea of combat in a world filled with threats and friends. The ebb and flow of battle; the thrills and the agonies of success and failure are all left to the player to replicate as best as they can.
schurem hit the nail on the head. At least for a lot of people - and me.
My uncle was a pilot flying a B-26 when shot down and killed. Jason’s adding a B-26 to the BoX series.
That will be a first day buy for me and a very surrealistic flight…
Our “cousin John” played the role of uncle for my older brothers. Unfortunately I didn’t get to know him until a few years before his death last year. He flew Marauders out of Italy. It was a pretty dangerous ride even before things got heated. Bombers don’t normally appeal to me much but that one very much does.
Well credit to @smokinhole and @schurem again - despite my relatively young age in this crowd, I am also formed by some of the similar methods to enjoy sims. I took to them of my own accord, and was awestruck by the CF-18 at an Airshow in 2003 (I was 9).
Later I found out that my paternal grandfather was certified as a navigator - flew in Dakotas (just recently found this bit out) and Lancasters. My maternal grandfather was 16 in ‘44 and conscripted and in training at war’s end - part of which included gliders. He was into flight sims a bit as well, but that I only learned well after I began my own sim flying around ‘05/‘06 I think it was.
I bring this up because I am close to the generational disconnect about which you speak. Had my parents been younger, and then I born later perhaps some of the connection would not have been there (I gather there may have been some influences at ages where I am too young to clearly recall anymore).
Actually, the F-35 flies for you while you do the fighting. Of course, it’s all button pushing for that stuff. 
That is the goal, however. A pilot that has to spend all his time flying has no time to be fighting, and vice versa. The days when they were the same are over. The military wants a plane that nearly flies itself (because APs work) while the butt in the seat decides how to attack what. Otherwise you need 2 people optimally to crew and that’s a drain on resources.
I remember back in the Il-2 46 days people exclaiming, quite seriously, that it wasn’t a game it was a sim!! We all know how 46 modeled planes and weapons compared to BoX or DCS or P3D, yet these people had deluded themselves into believing they weren’t playing a game. They were too serious and important a person to play a game. I’m sure they played poker or watched football or whatever on a regular basis, but the concept that they would play a video game evoked some disgust in themselves they couldn’t bear and they had to scream how it was a sim.
Enter the no-labels, cockpit-only, zero aids, permadeath (except for dogfight MP, naturally!), not-an-ounce-for-casual-players fascist mob who so obviously loathed themselves for liking this hobby that they excoriated any who didn’t adhere to their narrow view of what was acceptable. Anything below was proclaimed Air Quake with a frothing mouth as they tried to argue that Il-2 was 100% accurate, even though every patch changed multiple planes in sometimes drastic ways. “Now they’re 105% accurate!” 
I was there, and remember it as the beginning of the end of one of the great ages of flight simulation.
Again, it’s not that there is no merit in taking simulation seriously, it’s that when one facet begins to overwhelm and crowd out/reject the others as illegitimate, you eventually lose those other players, in the process shrinking the tent of potential purchasers of new products.
As sales declined even as strident demand for labor intensive features that were expensive and time consuming to implement rose ever higher, the financial disconnect led to the great simulation houses of yore one by one throwing in or being forced to throw in the towel.
That’s how I remember it, at least, and I remember a feeling of helplessness in the light of an oncoming train as the casuals were chased out by the hardcore, and once lively forums shrank and emptied out and eventually closed.
I never want to see that happen again.
I don’t begrudge the hardcore sim pilots their hobby, but I kind of laugh at the notion that time in DCS A-10C could enable the uninitiated to climb into one of those beasts, fire it up, and do anything aside from turning it into a $40M smoking crater. I have seen people in online forums claim they could do the real thing because of their PC running a piece of software. If it were only so easy.
For me, the problem is having to choose between one extreme or the other. Either I have to have a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering from A&M, or I press one button to take off. There is no middle ground. I think what the middle ground sims like Strike Fighters 2 and the like do for the fanbase is mimic the years of training and work it takes to be a professional aviator by shortcutting all of the things that are innate for the pilot. The real pilot isn’t thinking, “I press this button, then this one, then turn this knob”, he or she is literally doing everything by muscle memory because that is how much training they have had. They don’t have to map things to a HOTAS because they have drilled the procedures into their heads to the point that the workspace is dedicated entirely into completing the mission, not the little step-by-step tasks. They are that good at what they do.
I think games like EF2K, TAW, and the Jane’s sims did a better job of giving the user the real impression of what it meant to fly and fight in these machines than DCS ever has. Those decisions are made in split seconds and the relaxed difficulty of the avionics in those titles puts you in the shoes of trained pilot who is up there to survive and succeed. Here’s to hoping those titles make a comeback.
Totally agree, PFunk. I’ve always felt SF and FC2/3 did a great job of allowing people to experience the more meaningful aspects without requiring they treat it like a job. Yeah, some people like that aspect of it, and that’s fine, but it shouldn’t be required as a point of entry.
I will be honest and say I’ve not tried the game mode/easy mode whatever in DCS lately, but I get the feeling it turns a DCS plane into a HAWX one instead of an FC3 one. I don’t want “press T to cycle targets” necessarily, but on the other hand the way it’s really done is a LOT of steps and easier to mess up.
Pfffft
It’s a sim
And I could fly a real A-10C
LOL
I have too much time on my hands today…
I’m not a ‘rivet counter’, yet I would love to have a sim that got as close to the real thing as possible (given it’s really all make believe anyway). It’s a learning thing to me; learning something new that has an historical basis and/or registers a connection with me.
Some consequence would be neat, but I’m weird that way: electrodes hooked to my chair should I crash the plane? But I digress…
What some seem to miss, in my humble opinion, is that what you are really doing is at a higher (more abstract?) level: manipulating a platform in space to apply projectiles against a target, using procedures that were/are in use in the real world. If you care about such things.
The closer that platform & system is to a real one serves to stimulate your imagination to the degree your prefer - NEVER lose your imagination…you heard it here first
To those who get their nappies in a wad over how, say, the Aim-120 isn’t 100% accurate, or the Viper’s turn rate at X velocity should be Y ^10, not Y ^2, well if your goal is to win an engagement vs another modeled platform in this same [limited] world, then…
It doesn’t matter: your ‘task’ is to use the environment/tools you are given to accomplish what you desire - within that world (the restraints in place) as defined.
And yes, these things should be designed with an “Easy Button” and a “Good luck” button (for reasons other’s here have expressed).
But some things in the real world of flight are difficult - mostly requiring great degrees of discipline based on those aviators I’ve known!
I like the personal challenge (hard for me, easy for others) and don’t mind failure anymore (wish I’d been better at this when I was 20-something).
Building software for the varied tolerances of failure is harder to engineer.
It’s the journey, to over use a cliche.
…Hmm. probably why I’ve taken up golf (cuzz I’m too old for rugby) - there is no “Easy Button” in golf (unless you are the 1% that are gifted). With every minuscule bit of improvement I forget the hours of failure leading up to it. And knowing I’ll never master it has an appeal I can’t describe. In fact, I should be practicing right now (for a tournament in a few months)…gotta go.
Or something like that
Yes very much to this. I’ve mentioned it elsewhere but my few rides in the back of these beasts (that I’m eternally grateful for!) proved this to me. The Viper was a piece of cake to ‘fly’ - I even flew [too] close formation for about a 60 miles. It’s supposed to be easy to fly [‘they’ say] - keep it pointed where you need to (the throttle was more difficult).
There’s a lot of presumptuous types out there. Or just ignorant, or both.
I’m a pretty good Virtual Viper Flyer now but IN NO WAY does that mean anything more than I can hold a pretty good, though limited, conversation on the subject at cocktail parties.
I really miss IL2:1946. It was such a great multiplayer community. So many planes and theaters and all were owned by all. By the time I came to the sim there was little to no segregation of the community by different products. I would play on the Warbirds of Prey server for hours and hours. They would rotate PNG one hour, North Africa the next and Norway after that.
What I miss about IL2-1946 was demon’s most excellent, quick mission builder!
Wish DCS would update theirs.
Schurem hit the nail on the head for me! As a private pilot IRL, I know a simulator will never quite match the real thing. But the odds that I will ever have the money and time to own a real Sopwith or Fokker are slim, and even if I did I still couldn’t engage in a real, unscripted, no-maneuvers-barred dogfight with it! Simulators let me experience what can’t be done in reality, and experience a little taste of what it was like for those brave men of yesteryear.
That sounds like the ultimate billionaire’s faceoff 
It would increase demand and pay of flying instructors
It will be interesting as real world military aviation technology continues to evolve. If I was designing a combat aircraft, I would want the pilot to be able to simply hit a “next target, closest target, highest threat target” button, I would want labels, and sensors that just lockup threats, etc. Honestly an “arcade mode” combat experience is exactly what I would want the pilots to have. What will the rivet counting crew do when that is the reality of military aviation?
We already see real-world examples of this, the HTS pod for the F-16 automates and tremendously simplifies the arcane task of finding and fixing air defense system radars. It basically lets your move a cursor on the target symbol on the map, press select, and fire off a HARM. It honestly reminded me more of using the weapons systems in ARMA than something I would find in a real-world combat aircaft.