I’m actually with you there, the methods by which is achieved actually don’t really matter a ton, because I think the fundamental issue isn’t the methods, it’s the trainer approach.
Firstly, the trainer license is extremely explicit about disallowing merging the program with any other program. So, it is not possible to ship these trainers within a package, and unless you have a license from Garmin to distribute (which I don’t believe anyone does, not can I imagine Garmin allowing it) you can’t even put the trainer in your package. This solution can’t ever be on the marketplace simply for legal reasons.
But secondarily, there’s an important market forces angle here. RXP isn’t the only developer in this space, and we can’t have a conversation about how great everything is for all developers by talking about RXP in isolation. Is it fair to those developers who want to build a great experience in the sim, which requires some serious work, and is an ideal user experience situation, to just always be undercut by trainer programs where one merely has to build a bridge and piggyback on the hard work of Garmin? How does one foster a healthy Garmin sim ecosystem while also admitting that one effectively has to compete with Garmin themselves?
So, yes, my personal focus will always be enabling the in-sim one-to-one replica experience first, which is free and clear of all of those issues and quite objectively a better user experience. And I would be so incredibly stoked to partner with Jean-Luc and say “let’s build a new 430/530 that runs inside the sim addon system together, and we’ll build whatever new APIs you need to make it completely accurate.” Wouldn’t it be so incredibly amazing to make it so awesome and accurate that the trainer was effectively obsolete? And who better to help do that together with?
But that doesn’t mean I’m going to not bring these other issues to the table in earnest and see what the rest of the team thinks, because I’m just one FS team lead amongst the small collection of us.
-Matt | Working Title