Personal Comments and Observations
I’ve been with the community since August 2020 launch and joined volunteer staff the year after.
Those who know my soapbox topics
will find this familiar. Sorry friends, you can skip this because you’ve heard it, but for the rest of the community, it’s probably helpful to have historical context.
With regard to launch - well, FS2020 was immediately followed by one of the most crunch intensive Agile Sprints for about six months to patch functionality and game breaking defects. MS and Asobo worked up until about two weeks before Christmas, pushing a Sim Update equivalent at least once, if not twice a week during that time.
ATC, IFR, AI Traffic, Weather - are all interconnected - through the Flight Plan. One of the pillars that needed to be recast is Flight Planning. Everyone knows the gaps in 2020’s World Map - which explains in no small part why Working Title got the nod to create the EFB and re-boot Flight Planning.
That’s Step 1 in a long road to recasting the other aforementioned items - none of it could be started in FS2020 because it was too deeply embedded in the core sim.
Fix Flight Planning, make it AIRAC compliant, and ATC, proper IFR and even cueing AI Traffic off the player’s plan is facilitated better in FS2024. Maybe even open the door to things like ATC interactive Weather Deviation. But it needs time to bake - argueably years. You can decide for yourself if that was worth holding up the rest of the sim.
You can see Agile at work here - lots of things are arguably Minimum Viable Product. Others are pure defects - needs time and space to work off the Backlog.
This isn’t an attempt to placate or dissuade. Folks are going to feel what they’re going to feel, and no amount of conversation will likely blunt that. But as someone who was a long time end-user (I was a PSion FS’er on a Sinclair ZX), and more recently joined the Developer side as QA Staff for one of the contractors, I have the benefit (and yes, the cringe) of seeing how the sausage is made and consumed.
Nothing is easy in a project this big. Time and Effort are but two of many factors that weigh into a release. There are so many moving parts, it would boggle the average end-user.
The only counsel I can give is the same one I learned in August '20. Give it time. Things will get better, and arguably for all its warts, FS2020 four years and four months from launch is by far a much improved product, and so will FS2024. 