Increasing RAM speed has helped significantly. Still stuttering at heavy airports but I’m much more reliably hitting 40+ fps giving the CPU more juice on the memory.
Will keep playing with it, but going to chock most of other issues up to poor optimization on Asobo’s part and hope they keep smoothing it out. Biggest issue now is a severe performance decrease (FPS down to the single digits) when flying over NYC area. This was a persistent issue for me even with the old setup, so I’ll save it for another thread.
Appreciate the help everyone!