I compliment you Wall-dog and Capt.Rooster both for two excellent posting, and I would like to say that there are some VERY astute observations here for the reader, some of which I am only now coming to realize myself!

Perhaps much of what Wall-dog's words express is the need for eminent simulation playability to be tied to an alluring sense of realism. I've really never thought of making a qualitative comparison between simulating realism, and simulating harder realism, but this is an excellent way to approach the on-going debate between simulation playability, the fun factor, and hardcore realism as opposed to a simulated feel of authenticity.

Firstly, I've always felt that more-real, means more-fun, well now I'm not so sure. Because as Wall-dog puts it, sometimes more-real means too-hard-real, and a loss of playabilty, as well as introducing a factor which threatens to raise the benchmark for developers so high that it jeopardizes to stifle our genre's future!

A personal case in point may be my current experience in two on-going WWI mod developments, both having high-fidelity modeling, good to great graphics, and "open-source" coding. One to me is superbly playable, although it's flight modeling may not be as dynamically demanding as it could be, while the other is so "realistic" as to threaten to smother any desire or ability I have to enter into the FIGHT with it! Now I thought an "ultra-realistic" mod would undoubtedly trump the latter iteration, but now I'm beginning to loose enthusiasm for it, because it almost seems to be pretending to be real, by just being "real hard". The end result of this experience is that I'm now longing to jump back into my "imperfect" experience, because it's a perfectly playable mod!

I still believe in the stalwart goals of quality and immersion, but as Wall-dog expresses, I'm beginning to have real doubts about the need for hard-realism, as opposed to convincing, but eminently playable realism, with the adjunct of game appeal and ease of development thrown into the equation!

This is truly a set of issues I'm finding quite relevant, not only because of my current flight sim experiences, but also because it's something that most certainly may relate to our hobby in general, and in a much broader way, as Wall-dog and Capt.Rooster have explained above.

Sorry if I may have been a bit behind the ball in understanding this, but I'm really starting to "get it" now!

Thanks guys for taking the time to form these thoughts, and to present them here for us!