To begin with, most of your posts read as though you have been sitting in on the planning meetings with the MSFS executives. Everything you have stated is conjecture. Much of what you are stating as fact is in fact contrary to what the team has been saying since day one.
Lets start with third party add on software. From day one, Asobo/Microsoft has stated that there would be no effort put forth to create fully operational “study level” default aircraft. This was done as a conscious effort to leave that market to the aftermarket developers.
A/M also stated that they believed that those 3rd parties were the future of the genre. Not just aircraft, but plugins and enhancements as well. Many users, in this thread alone, that have pointed to the poor ATC, AI traffic and live weather. They have also mentioned the 3rd party software that offers enhancements or sometimes replaces those default services. Already we are seeing a growing number of those improvements. Just as A/M had predicted.
The new evolution toward cloud based software, both in business applications and gaming, has changed the way add ons interact. The voracity of people about their data security has forced the developers to build in excessive security to any software that allows for 3rd party involvement. Given any opportunity to access our computers, the cyber criminals will exploit it. It is with that in mind that Microsoft has changed the way that plug-ins work with MSFS. In previous versions developers created dynamic link libraries as “modules” to alter the behavior of the sim environment and allow software to independently manipulate the Windows environment to suit their purpose. Once you allow access outside the base sim, there is very little to prevent free roam within our private data.
This new focus toward system security means that 3rd party developers cannot use the code they spent years creating for things like the PMDG 737NG series. They now must start over. They cannot simply port over the code. The programmers have to learn new ways of doing things. This all takes time. It took years, not months, for some of the study level aircraft we enjoyed previously, to be produced. It will take years to do it again, in a different language.
A/M has admitted that they went a bit too far in the oversimplification of the Garmin systems. They have created new partnerships to improve some of the default behaviors but do not expect the functionality of any of the default systems to ever match up to what the pros on the outside will offer us.
Much of the frustration in this thread comes from users that expected a complete experience out of the box. Fully interactive ATC. Live weather that you could consistently match up with what you see out the window. Airliners with operational circuit breakers and FMCs that matched the real world. Fully functional Garmin touch screen cockpits. All of these things were promised, they say. Yes they were. They told us it would be “As Real As It Gets”. I am convinced they were looking at the vision of where this sim will be when some of us have $5000 worth of add-on hardware and software plugged into our sims.
Just look at the price of one high end (still NOT study level) aircraft. Shop for some of the premiere weather and scenery add-ons. You could easily spend hundreds to boost your sim. Would you have purchased MSFS if all those Pro features were already included? Would you have purchase this sim if was $999 and not $99? Why not? That is the sim you expected. That is what you will have invested into it in a couple of years. So why not now?
