Over lunch just now, I tried to test this with FlightRecorder (0.14). I setup a very short flight from Southend Pier to land at Southend Airport (EGMC), and allowed the copilot to have a crack it at. I recorded the result until wheels down (when the copilot had actually touched down off the right of the runway, and then veered violently off the left of the runway, ending up stopped on the grass perpendicular to the runway 
), I then stopped the flight recording and played it back while capturing with CapFrameX.
At first I seemed to be getting quite consistent results, running the 5 minute flight over a few times without changing settings. I then started playing with HAGS and Game Mode, and it turned out that the best result was one of middle runs with both HAGS and GM on … so I went back and retested it, and got a fairly average result.
So, at least on this very short flight, the consistency isn’t really there. It’s worth noting by the way, from your discussion of whether or not the playback is easier on the sim or not … broadly speaking, it seems not. Again, this could just be general lack of consistency, but the first time I did the recording, immediately followed by playing it back to check FPS, the playback actually faired slightly worse than when the copilot was flying.
Later tonight if I have time, I’ll do my full 15 minute flight from parking to parking at 2 different airports (a route I often do), recording it as I go, without benchmarking. I’ll then do at least 2 runs of replaying that flight back (same options like multiplayer off, same starting time/weather, etc) on each mode to check it’s consistent. I’ll do this with the 4 combos of HAGS and Game Mode, and check that the 2 results of each test seem fairly consistent with each other. At the end, I’ll take the winner and re-run a 3rd time to triple check, and post my results here.
If anyone has any reccs for changes to that procedure, do let me know - as I don’t want to spend hours on this every night, I’d rather actually be playing 