It does seem like that while in the past you'd get "a sim" for your money that included a plane (or more), a theater (or more), AI non-flyables, ground units (targets), and so on that would be new/remade/refreshed with every release, we're now in the worst possible outcome of a modular design.

For literally decades, since Falcon 3.0, the dream of a modular flight sim has been attempted and collapsed many times. ED finally did it...and it's not turned out the way we hoped at all. Development times measured with multiple calendars for just a plane, while other areas languish for years and years. There's no incentive to make a new terrain because the new plane plugs into it. Would people have bought successive Il-2 sims if each one used the same maps as the 2001 release?

Personally, I never cared for half the stuff they bothered to model. Radios? TACAN/DME/VOR? Fine tuning fusing options?
While I appreciate the effort that went into the Ka-50, A-10C, Mig-21bis, and others, I find in all cases they spent considerable time on features I will never even touch. The Su-25T is pretty much as far as I need them to go, with the addition of a clickable cockpit. So it's great work, I just think only a fraction of their customers are actually utilizing it.

At this point, I wish all these modules would just be made to FC3 levels with a clickable cockpit and then have them move on to the next FC3-level plane or helo. If everything was limited to that, how many more would we have right now that would likely be in a better state since it's not as hard to make the planes work properly when you're only modeling the absolutely necessary systems?

Since DCS' first release 8 years ago progress has been what I would describe as glacial all to satisfy the system modeling needs to the minority of their customers. Most of us want a great plane that flies and fights accurately against other great planes but have little to no interest in taking week-long courses to learn how to reroute fuel flow when a flak hit takes out the starboard pump, activate emergency oxygen with the cabin decompression, and so on.


Forget a $60 Mirage 2000 that lets me do things only a real 2k pilot would know had to be done, I'd be perfectly happy with an endless parade of $30 FC3-level planes like the Mirage, Falcon, Tomcat, Viggen, Apache, and so on that can get done in a year. Then, if demand is there, retrofit the DCS level systems into them later as paid DLC. Meanwhile, we could have been flying them without that.




The Jedi Master