I don’t see how Asobo choosing to hand-do an airport in any way “competes” with a 3rd party redoing an airport any more than there’s an issue with 2 or more 3rd parties competing with each other.
If it’s part of the base package, assuming all is working correctly, then, if the 3rd party properly develops the airport, they’ll delete Asobo’s version and insert their own in the VFS.
If, instead it’s a separate airport (i.e. Gaya) and isn’t affected by the “delete airport” commands in the scenery editor, then, just like any other addon, the user needs to be instructed to go into the Content Manager and remove the one they don’t want (as it will be a separate package).
It’s no different than two different 3rd Parties choosing to develop a Piper Arrow or a Spitfire. It’s up to users to choose which they want.
As far as GPS’s, it’s just another gauge. Again, the user can choose which gauge is used based on support from the third party vendor aircraft. The only thing that’s missing here is that Asobo needs to expose more functionality for developers to access information from the underlying sim. They’re working on that. But that has nothing to do with “competition” or “not competing”.
I always thought their comment they “don’t want to compete” was silly. All the tools are there for users to choose which they want to load and what they want to spend their money on.
As far as weather, I agree with their decision to own it. The access into the sim is way too complicated to allow others to develop the weather system. We just need to be patient and wait for them to finish it. I am 100% positive, and they’ve said as much, that they have big plans for this. And such plans take quite some time to implement.
The “dev forum” was developed because the number of developers has absolutely exploded, and they saw a need for a new portal for direct communication with the SDK team. I’m 100% positive that one-on-one communication with developers is still happening. Nothing has changed here, in fact, it’s improving at a record pace.