I must admit that so far I hadn’t specifically paid attention to locations with “watermasks”: I knew that they exist and people got excited about, but I never bothered to pickup some coordinates and go actually fly there myself.
Second, when I’ve heard that “there will be music playing” during the new “Discovery Flights” I was kind of sceptical: “Yeah, some game mode for console aficionados! Whatever…”
But oh! did I get hooked! “My God, it’s full of watermasks!” (in order to paraphrase some famous movie quote).
And the epic music really put me into the right mood to reflect for a moment “how far we have come” with fligth simulations (don’t worry, this won’t be a “why are we here” philosophical epilogue - hopefully ;)),
(Screenshot: Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer - one of my absolute highlights of my flight simulator teenage days ;))
So I but the airplane into a slight left bank and gazed out of the window, into the perfectly cyan-blue water and the gorgeous Mount Otemanu! I genuinely felt the exact same excitement like on day one of my FS 2020 experience!
For the record: I am not a real-word pilot. I don’t even consider myself a “serious simmer” - and that’s probably to my advantage here. That is to say I am not constantly trying to observe every little movement of the aircraft, nor am I constantly comparing the instruments with the real world. I just “enjoy the ride” - and I can do so, as I have absolutely no clue how a real-world aircraft would behave. But it feels right - it feels authentic, and that’s all that counts for me. Every little (or bigger) “bumper” the aircraft made made me feel like I just hit a turbulence (which I probably did in the sim).
And what is usuallly not so often talked about, but the water reflections (I am talking about the waves now, and how “water” is rendered in general in MSFS), the reflections of the clouds in the water (!), the way the water changes its colour depending on the angle of view and the position of the sun… that’s just gorgeous!
Not to talk about the clouds, they are still unbelievable real to me! And now we talk about the “scale”! Probably just 10 years ago the “Bora Bora” scenery would be completely “handcrafted” and all we would get to fly in. “That’s your sandbox, enjoy!”. Now I know that I could fly to every island that is in the haze, at the far end of the visible horizon! Amazing!
And now we are talking about the entire planet… !
Performance? I am the kind of person that counts the “frames per second” visually, that is, with my eyes. Like 1 FPS, 2 FPS, oh my, 5 PFS… that might be 10 FPS… after that, I stop counting 
I never bothered to measure the FPS with any tool on my computer. But I can definitively tell (by sceneries where I flew before the SU 5) that performance in my case has increased a lot. And Bora Bora? Supersmooth for me (we are talking iMac 27" 2020, 32 GB RAM, 16 GB VRAM, with a resolution of 2560x1440 on Ultra, for reference)!
Absolutely mind-bending - and relaxing at the same time 
So everybody who is counting texture pixels from 25’000 feet above ground or measuring internet download speed in the first hour or the release - relax!
“Do the Bora Bora thing” and you will be amazed