I've been flying Falcon 4.0 in all its flavours since it came out in 1998. Still by far the best simulation, not only in terms of avionics and FM (DCS is on par here), but the sense of war, the feeling that things are going on around you, that your actions have consequences. It's totally immersive even in SP, while DCS feels like nothing more than en empty box, with totally dumb AI and no ground war. Let's face it, DCS has absolutely nothing in terms of AI, weapons and ATC. There has been no noticeable evolution in any of these areas since lock-on.
ED has a very very long way to go, to even scratch the surface of how deep Flaocn 4.0 is and was, even in 1998. But again, they are so self-celebrating, I don't think any of the above will ever get a serious look at.
This reminds me of a flight I had, during night time in Korea in Falcon. Strange, how I have no cherishing or even worthy memories from DCS, even if I played some of their missions and campaign.
I was climbing, had the night vision off and watching the last few drops of sunlight disappear in the horizon when I noticed, just over the DMZ, flashes on the ground. I kept flying and looking at it and thinking "I'm so glad I'm not on the ground right now!".
Then, on another mission, in the afternoon, a flight was escorting me to my objective, which was to bomb a few buildings. One of my escorts got shot down, and ejected. I completed my mission, and while I was turning, I saw the other escort flying in circles around where his wingman got shot down. It kept circling there for a good while, and since I had fuel, and missiles I decided to join too. Eventually he had to return, and I kept in there for a little while longer, since I still had my drop tanks and enough fuel to return. But, after a while, I had to RTB. That's when, on my way back, I noticed a blackhawk flying right under me. If that helicopter was meant to recover the downed pilot, or for something else, I don't know, but it was an amazing experience.
I never got into Falcon as much as I did FC and DCS, it just happened to be the one I missed (appeared when I was just getting into flight sims and also did not have much in the way of PC hardware). I also was never hooked on to the DC. When I finally did get Falcon, I did the same thing I do in DCS. Mission Editing. Even from this perspective, Falcon is quite strong. No doubt it does somethings better than DCS, and this is the basic 4.0 AF I'm talking about, which is the only version I own.
However, I don't think DCS gets enough credit at times. I can't say that you're wrong in not having any memorable DCS experiences, it is after all your experience. Yet the kind of thing you described above isn't beyond DCS. I try to evolve my mission making ability as time goes on, though my "golden era" was the FC2 days. I put out what I consider to be some really good missions back then when I was on the sim regularly. One of the standouts for me was a F-15 escort mission near a large city. I had placed significant ground forces around the city hoping to make the ground below a little more lively. It worked out far better than I expected, the city constantly deteriorated over the coarse of the mission. At first only a few points of fire and smoke were visible, but when the air battle was over and I was heading back to base, I could see that a big portion of the city was on fire. That was for me, truly an immerse and memorable experience.
The issue is, this kind of thing takes work to set up in DCS. In Falcon, you can let the game set it up for you. For those who don't want to spend time creating content, I see the issue. The ideal for DCS would probably be to have more content creators. It just hasn't happened though.
