Agree, career mode is a bit odd in that for a serious flight simmer or real world pilot it is totally unrealistic, and for a casual player it is too realistic.
Perhaps some actually good flight lessons from zero to hero with adequate briefing material and debriefing (you know, like FS9 released in 2004 had) would solve the problem.
This “simulator” has close to zero educational value.
For someone who is a real pilot or for folk who have had years of flight simming this may be true that it is unrealistic. For me, it gave me the courage to try in Career mode because the lessons were so simplistic and forced you to look up terminology especially and use videos and online support like Boldmethod and others. It allowed me to fail and pick up again without anyone looking over my shoulder. Then I could fly A to B with delivery of aircraft which gave me a basic insight into G1000, ATC, 172, landings and take offs and it built from there.
It got me hooked. I am still miles away from the knowledge base of most of everyone on this forum and I will back Career mode to the hilt for giving me the opportunity to enjoy all this sim has to offer.
Yes things could and should be different with more realistic lessons and it should be in much better depth. Hopefully they will improve those in the future but somehow I doubt it given Navigraph and a couple of others have produced those already.
The lessons in FS9 were really well put together, something like that would be a game changer. Also the FSX missions and reward system was so much more interesting than this AI slop of a career mode. If you have done one mission you have done all of them, even the dialogs are exactly the same.
I know the faults but I did not fly when FS9 or FSX was about. This is what we have now. Would I now want a better system, knowing what I do now - yes, probably. However, Career mode did help me get into this hobby.
Does it need a lot of fixes - oh yes.
I’ve been saying since the sim dropped that the biggest missed opportunity (and that is being generous) is the education. You’re spot on - it’s too realistic for beginners, but focuses on nit-picky things that it gets wrong, anyway. And the latter makes it ridiculous for real pilots.
The tragic part is that this frustrates a lot of people while also teaching them to focus on a lot of nonsense, at the same time ignoring major things that would get you in a lot of trouble in the real world.
Career mode should have started as a loose framework to provide context and impetus to flying, not a bunch of ticky-tack rules and pointless banter. The cart definitely led the horse.
Well, for starters, it does have difficulty settings. Settings → Assistances and you can tweak a whole bunch of settings even more than most games let you.
Second of all, Career Mode simplifies the entire process to a ridiculous degree, “Press Enter to automatically request boarding.” if you have passengers. “Press Enter to automatically tune to the correct frequency and request IFR/taxi/takeoff.” “Press Enter to automatically announce to passengers.” “Press Enter to automatically announce on Final.”
Third, there is no exam here, or any real life consequences, you can get penalised, simply accept it and not make the same mistake next time. I have gotten penalised for deploying flaps at too high a speed numerous times, I simply looked up the proper flaps speeds if it is not written on the aircraft panel itself. I have not gotten a flaps overspeed since, except when I get careless and actually make a mistake.
At some point you need to ask yourself if this game delivers what you want from a flight simulator game.
Finally, this is not even a “difficulty” problem, but an information problem. If you had framed this as “the game does not teach players X” then I would 100% agree with you.
It’d be nice if they gave a quantified rundown of what the sim perceived as errors at the end of the flight. Bonus if the whole postflight experience includes a visual of the flight path and altitude/speed (and even configuration) graphs like popular flight tracking sites have. Then you can show the penalty points with red dots so you can learn from it.
After that, keep a tally of the penalties - date, type, airplane type, etc. Can a pilot trend better or not?
This would also help us discover and report bugs.
Is that too much to ask?
Personal Comments and Observations
Many of the design decisions were designed to draw in the casual players and Console owners - hence the event and radio call shortcuts as an example. That also creates a permissive experience for players who wouldn’t necessarily have the hardware to simulate more sophisticated tasks like radio panels or other avionics. Also, the initial rollout such as fixed weather and no traffic reinforced this approach, albeit some of it may also have been integration gaps that have since been addressed in later Sim Updates.
Where I have the biggest dissonance is the mission designs that don’t take into account aircraft performance envelopes - either in distance, duration or origin/destination airfields. As such, the artificial gating of flight planning by locking down W&B just makes things really frustrating to the novice player who does want a sense of agency in terms of executing the mission.
First of all I haven‘t been using the career mode for a long time. This said some of the issues I will mention might have been fixed already.
But let me start with the issues from the TO (I do not want to upset you, nor tell you what to do or not).
A lot of the issues mentioned can be looked up, flaps speed you will find on the dashboard or in the manual of the plane.
Airspaces and their limitations can be found in the net.
As mentioned by JM2355 the career mode is already pretty easy. Most of the time you only must press enter. No need to look something up like frequencies aso.
I find it more problematic that you get punished for things you can not look up somewhere. F.E. these sightseeing missions. You know you must fly to 3 different locations. At the same time, you do not know what FL you have to be at the given location. Would you not determine this during the flight planning. No you get the voice (text) from the off telling you, that the target altitude is 200 feet higher or lower than you are. Just when you arrive at the location.
This does not make sense.
Same with suddenly change of the runway for your destination. This can happen due to weather, but than you get punished for not landing on the runway specified on the flight plan. I cannot look this up. Only way would be to restart a 3h flight and even than you will not be able to do it right.
On top I do not understand who is the target audience for Career mode? Is it the new sim pilot? Is it the experience sim pilot to keep him engaged?
If it is the first, I think it is ok as it is. A lot of people make the mistake to rush trough the different stages because they want to fly the big birds.
If it is for keeping the “experienced” sim pilots engaged, why can I use the planes I would like to use or have bought.
And I am not only talking about planes that not get sold on MP. F.E. I did purchase the native Kodiak from SWS. I cannot use it in Career, only if I purchase it a second time via the MP?
Why?
Finally, I think the career mode is a huge missed opportunity, it could have been great, as of now it is more a way to make money by pushing MP sales. On top why not make the different task available also in free flight. This might even solve the TO issues, because he will not get punished.
Just my 2ct
Enable the flight path in assistances to get travel cueing. It’s not realistic, but it makes up for the lack of a detailed briefing. I personally enable it so I can pass the Gold Missions that unlock a particular specialization, then I can move on.
The target audience is everyone. That’s why Career isn’t really that great. You can’t meet a one-size-fits-all approach to the variety and depth of players based on skills, interest, time and expense factors.
Some of it works well. Some of it is an absolute glaring gap that needs more work.
Agreed, I just wish someone could get MS/Asobo to actually give this Career mode some actual attention and not just the odd bit here and there!
I completely agree with you and don’t mind at all the assistance options granted to pilots that may not have the knowledge and/or hardware to perform the more complex tasks. You still have to fly the plane from point A to B (wait, no you don’t - you can use the silly, buggy, skip feature, but I digress).
The design of career mode was totally botched, in my opinion. The training aspect, I don’t mind. You can’t expect the average newcomer to go through a grueling PPL ground school and checkride. That would scare most everyone away. The watered down versions of certifications you currently have to go through are totally fine in my book.
With that being said, you had an EXCELLENT learning center in FSX (provided by John and Martha King!!!) that could have been expanded upon and included in MSFS to allow those that want a deeper understanding of concepts to do so. But no, all we get is an instructor that poorly and sometimes erroneously explains very broad concepts in the few training missions before your career actually starts.
And then the worst aspect of career, the AI generated voices for the missions. These completely uncreative AI generated missions are embarrassing. After 2 hours of attempting to enjoy the career mode upon MSFS24’s release, I haven’t touched it since, primarily due to the AI. I never even encountered any bugs that many users still complain about. It was just the horrible AI-ness that completely put me off. If this was an attempt to demonstrate Microsoft’s AI technology, it completely failed.
What we should have been given were something like the FSX style of missions. Thoughtful mechanics, voice acting, rewards, creativeness… god, how I miss those missions. Sometimes I fire up FSX just to re-play some of my favorites. They were also categorized into various levels of difficulty, from the Training Missions, to Beginner, Intermediate, Hard, and Expert. All came with a time estimate too! So you never had to wonder if you had enough time to sit down and play through it - no need for a skip feature.
I only am scratching the surface when I say there were so many possibilities when it came to designing career mode, and the ball was completely dropped. The lack of thought and passion that was put into it is so incredibly disappointing. They took the “easy” path, included a Career mode for the sake of including a career mode, and it’s come back to bite them.
Personal Comments and Observations
IMHO - they ran out of time. It’s the only reasonable explanation - 2024 launch window + other competing aspects of the sim put a lot of external factors on top of creating an MVP. We’ll never really know, that’s the kind of question the Triumverate would definitely not want to dig into detail, and to be fair - it’s water under the bridge. The Career Module we have is the Career Module we got. 
I honestly liked the check rides with Rod Machado, so much so that I kept a working copy of FSX for the longest time just so I could go back to those lessons.
Totally forgot to mention Rod Machado too!
Agreed on water under the bridge. Maybe the next iteration of MSFS will pivot to something different (hopefully), but IMO the current implementation of Career mode is too far gone to be saved.
Side note, I keep FSX installed since its install size is less than 20GB, relatively small when compared to my behemoth of a Community folder 
I’m gonna go one step further and say that many of the things the training and career models have a pilot do would be downright dangerous in the real world. It’s affecting (virtual) flying in a negative way.
I’d go with nothing before I imparted those things.
Are we playing the same game? Most of the settings there get disabled in Career mode, and you are forced to use the settings Asobo has decided for you. The most egregious is the turbulence settings where you are forced to use the “realistic” settings. This gets me absurd turbulence, often on final right before touchdown. This flips my plane which gets detected as a crash because the crash setting is also disabled and forced on. Information cannot fix that problem.
There also are not any difficulty settings for the specifics of career mode. For example there are no settings for what the game will consider a “hard landing” or how long you have to notice you are exceeding the speed limit before you get penalized for it.
You are just doubling down on the condescension. Please stop lecturing on how this is a Simulator. It’s a video game you can buy on Steam, not an real FAA simulator. If you enjoy looking up and remembering 100 pieces of information for each plane you fly, that’s great. Not all of us do.
