The included 172 pair glass/steam are not bad and a crisply rendered place to be, along with the new Beaver for nostalgia that’s very serviceable/tolerable-definitely the most plain old fun on floats. Albeit glass, the standard Bonanza is a solid flyer. I find favorites in particular envelopes/missions. Really depends on what you want to do, how high, how fast, STOL or executive slick or nostalgic and noisy… And sometimes ‘realistic’ and enjoyable do not share the same space. There are times I want to be challenged and others when I want a pleasant flight and a nice smooth approach and ground work, like I know what I’m doing. Sometimes aircraft are just modeled to the point of being too fussy to enjoy, and you may mistake ‘realism’ for what is really just a poor model, and people spend countless hours on forums thinking there’s something they’re missing flying it.
And if you want to ‘get somewhere’ at 300+KT above and beyond, an executive 170KT IFR challenge, bush fly in awful weather, or enjoy the scenery are all COMPLETELY different missions.
Depends on what your plane to do and where you want to go, then find a decent aircraft to do it, the Shock Ultra is awesome for it’s mission, as is the Kodiak. For ‘flying a GA plane’, the steam 172 is still always a great choice. The Bonanza gets it done, but the original Vtail is a pleasant cruiser. BR Goose is awesome, and the Beaver is starting to win me over a bit. But I’m never deciding between any of these aircraft in the setup menu.
Bar none, the best overall XBox aircraft is still the Kodiak soup-to-nuts. Doesn’t mean you’ll ever want to fly one though, unless a utility TP is what you want to see in the setup menu. And there’s plenty of good already in your hangar. Just the recent avionics upgrade/bug fixing and flight model updates really put new life into some of the included planes.