I just had a very similar conversation. I showed the guy a picture. He pointed out how the trees look all wrong. Too big. Too fuzzy looking. The shoreline looks completely unrealistic and the sky is way too bright. The sim looked way better before.
Then I told him it was a picture taken out of my real life Baron on a flight up the inside passage on BCs west coast. He admitted he had never actually seen out the window of anything but an airliner and was surprised how different it looked from what he imagined.