the joke here is thinking SQL is “reasonable.”
I troubleshoot SQL at an OS level for my job and it’s a nightmare to set up and Asobo would likely have to hire someone to maintain said such a database (if they don’t already have an army of analysts already). IDK about where you live but in the US, database admins typically cost about 100k a year to start because you’re paying for someone’s time rather than their skillset or experience.
Not only that, you’d have to recode the game appropriately to interface with those databases. I feel like it’s easier to have the game read the data natively rather than having to tell the game to check against a database which could take time if the database is not optimized or you are the mercy of your ISP. I also don’t think people would be keen knowing there’s an 80gb (or bigger) mdf database getting downloaded to their computer if they decided to have the db local to the users computer to save bandwidth. You get too big a DB and it’ll bog down even the bestest of computers because the game has to go through all that data to find what it needs (assuming it hasn’t been optimized)
You’d just end up breaking more than you would if you just fixed the way the game brings in .pln files currently rather than reinvent the wheel.
I think it would be much easier for MSFS to create a standard flight plan format and developers would have to create a way for their planes to work with the standard MSFS format. not even .flp it could be .fsfp or .msfs or something idk. it doesn’t have to be .pln or .flp or whatever