John, FS has lived almost 20 years using the old and proven way.
Love of simulation aside, M$ STILL makes money out of their old versions of FS.
All this bandwagon COULD NOT have lasted 2 months, if it brought little or no income to M$, let alone almost 20 years.
M$ simply, BY THEIR OWN ADMISSION no less, tried to follow the marketing example of Apple... with US who NEVER were blithering idiots ready to ANY EXPENSE so to better be able to follow the fashions.
Something had to give... and it weren't the NOT blithering idiots etcetera.
Worse, technically the NEW software was a step... hell SEVERAL steps backwards if compared to the last versions of FS. Ever since its fifth incarnation FS had all the world, sometimes with little detail, but it was there. AND EVEN BEFORE, you could at THE VERY LEAST fly over almost all the CONUS (
can't remember if Alaska was part of those ancient versions or not).
I mean... THE REAL Hawaii is lovely, all right... but to tell us to take this much simulated land in all the planet and shut the hell up, after ALL THAT we've had in the past... you need some chutzpa.
...or drug induced insanity.
In the old FS versions had a certain amount of default planes. They weren't a lot in the older versions, and they weren't all that much either in all the versions, but were there nonetheless.
Remind me again, please... how many default planes had Flight?
And the last nail in the coffin? Absolute veto of any kind of freeware...
The lifeblood of ANY successful simulator... DENIED! What the hell have they been smoking? Exhausted nuclear reactor fission bars?
...OR payware that was not marketed BY THEM.
Who the holy f-word did they think they were? Hitler returned to life, perhaps? And if so, should we remember them what happened to their inspiration?
Oh... forgot we did already. On THAT side we can be DAMN proud of ourselves.
They went all the way to ask software houses like PMDG discussing... what? Of course no one knows the details of the proposed businesses, but if the software houses told them to stuff it, one can only draw ONE conclusion.
M$ got greedy. Were consumed by an unprecedented greed that went off scale and beyond reasons. And in their dream to CLUMSILY build up the Fourth Reich of software to fight the BAD and COMMUNIST Apple got trounced even before starting. And not only no one is going to be sympathetic with them, but they have only THEMSELVES to blame.
There is no such a thing as overkill. Only unworthy targets.