I spoke too soon. By going slowly and carefully through all the steps listed, I was indeed able get the airplane to consistently spawn in a cold and dark condition on a selected parking space. But, wow, ya get one little thing out of sequence, and running engine on the runway, here I come. I will have to develop a preflight checklist worthy of…well, a real-life preflight.
I have all the assistance settings turned off. Don’t need 'em.
I only use flight routings I have developed myself outside the sim because I find the in-sim flight planner to be worse than useless. I’ve been an Instrument-Instructor for almost 30 years. I think I know how to do it. The steps involved in getting the flight plan into a usable form are not overly complicated, just tedious.
So I can use workarounds (many thanks to those who posted them) to get the sim to operate as intended. And idea about when it’ll be fixed?