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You need no difficulty settings in a flight sim.
People want to get into something wquickly and have a success quickly. OTOH, I want to operate every switch and pump that had to be operated in RL to get the engine working. These two requirements can not be met without settings.

You might say you have air start for the newbies to get around it, but that is a setting as well and unrealistic as well.

Just a few days ago, on the newsgroup, someone asked for a sim with not too many keypresses. I can understand him, when I see the keycard of a new sim, and if I did not have a programmable stick I would ask myself how much time it will need to learn it. Many people do not even have a joystick at all.

Most hardcore (including professional) gamers I know do not fly flight sims at all, although they have a big pile of different games from different genres.

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You need historical era flight sim training planes and a deep manual and game interface that leads the flight sim Newbie through basic flight training and into combat training. This requires programming effort, not watering down realism as suggested here.
For many people, a deep manual is a turn off in itself. *I* would like such a thing and have already started gathering literature on the Tiger Moth and the SG38 so one day I can create right that. But this is no substitude for settings. I read "first light" about WWII, when planes were still easier to handle than today. On one evening, frustrated, the author went to a pub. He was later chewed out - not for being off base, but simply that he had lost a few hours to learn. This was at a time when training took months. IOW, they used probably 12+hours probably 6+days a week for months. Almost noone has that time. If you make it shorter, it will not be realistic training. Most things they learned are boring to the average gamer out there.

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A wider zoom cockpit view, at least 120 degrees maximum like LOMAC, and with zoom in view possible.
I agree with that one. I programmed it into BoB and enjoy it a lot. However, you have to realise many people will think it is a bug and think it shows that testing was super shoddy.

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And I don't mean the Sloppy LOMAC zoom controls that are slow but instant zoom in view like FB provides
Yes, that's how it is now in BoB.

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Pilot Lean. I agree with Wall Dog that we need pilot leaning control, but then Wall Dog states we can't have it yet (we can).
BoB has leaning. It is nioce during landing. I would not use it during a fight though.

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I could go on with more, but the pattern so far shows that everything here all depends on programming code to make it happen,
True. However this is a matter of man power, both for freeware where most projects have less than 3 people and for commercial games where simple the money misses. To do a AAA title costs about 70% more than 5 years ago. Flightsim budgets have not risen that much, if at all. I recently heard on a game dev forum about a buggy new fps "They had no chance to make it good quality - they only had 30 devs for 3 years".

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bizzare debates about flight sims being too realistic or too hard. There can never be such a thing.
There can. I once heard of a British bomber pilot that flew a lot of night missions. He was asked in an interview how many German planes he saw. He said he might have seen one - he once saw a twin on a divergent course that might have been a 110. I do not think it is fun for most people to "just" fly through FLAK and bomb and maybe hear their tailgunner shooting at someone and almost never see an enemy plane. Sure, you can have it as option, but do not force this onto the user. The people who flew in the bomber offensive at the time, who had all the sensations of flight and who knew it was a matter of life and death to look out, said it was "hours of boredom and minutes of sheer terror". Teut Weidemann recently said that games often do not compete for the money of the customer, but for the time. I simply have no time for a game where I spent hours each session.

About AI - most people fly offline, even in sims biased towards online game like Il2:FB. Also, I am sure many beginners want to start off offline.