Thank you for the excellent post. As a developer myself, I must come to the defence of the small and dedicated x-plane team. I fully support their slow and careful release process. In stark contrast to what's going on in MSFS 2020, where instability is king and where bugs don't get fixed for years, new releases break addons constantly, and the game itself often even fails to start, let alone that they force the updates - with x-plane, the officil release is incredibly stable, I can open the simulator every time with confidence that it would work as expected. The company listens to its users and responds to their inputs. While they don't always agree with some of the community members - they explain exactly why, and you cannot satisfy everybody all the time. But there is transparency. There is a clear log (MSFS has no log)
I highly value the stability, clarity, and transparency provided by the team. I value their careful release process, however long it takes. I abandoned MSFS and moved to X-Plane 12 exactly because of the low quality and instability experienced there. It's been a huge positive experience for me. Sure, I have my wish list - everybody does. But I'm a happy camper.
As for paying for upgrades. This one I really don't understand. Flight simmers are happy to pay thousands of dollars for their hardware. So why when it comes to the core software that this hardware is for do they get cheap all of a sudden. $60 once every 5 years? No subscription BS? This is nothing? What's there to complain about? Do people expect developers to work for free? I think that what the X-Plane folks charge is more than fair. It's cheaper than the competition for a better product. It's cheaper than some of the most popular add-ons. Paid upgrades are huge steps forwards and they don't force you to upgrade. You don't what to - you permanently own the previous version, and no one stops you from using it forever. Best deal in the world in my book.
