If you are a certain age, you will probably remember a book called "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." It was one of those books that young men read and found deep. Many, many years later, I still think of it. Although framed by a father-son trip on a motorcycle, it is really a chatauqua on what he calls the Classical-Romantic split, which he believes is the fault line in Western Civilization which, if tapped, breaks the world into two pieces.Motorcyle riding is Romantic; motorcyle maintenance is classical.I notice the same thing here. There are the numbers guys, who would fly a wire-frame model if its aerodynamic fidelity were good enough. This is the classical side to aviation. There is a lot to it: as anyone who has ever taken even a few hours of ground school knows, flying is math with a propellor on one end. "Systems depth" and "failures" and knowing the APU is by golly going to sip 150 pounds of fuel or the whole thing is rubbish.Then there are the Romantics. For them it is about the thrill of aviation, and a good visual model is at least as important as a spot-on flight model. They may prefer bush flying, or, if big iron, a collection of different equipment and livery, and all the scenery they can afford. They can't imagine what difference it makes if an airplane's APU draws fuel or not.Of course, most of us tend to be a mixture. But I would say I am more Romantic than Classical. I think that is at the bottom of the disagreements we sometimes see about products. It is because the different camps have different priorities.One of the nice things about this hobby is that it exercises my weak side, which is everything I got a liberal arts degree to avoid. I have to do math, and learn to use charts, and plan my flights.

Put me in the mixed column ...I rarely look at my aircraft from the outside so low fidelity airframes to me mean little loss of fps, definitely a Good Thing because I run on vanilla computers from Best Buy.But my panels have to be El Perfecto. I will never use all the features modeled in a high fidelity panel (electricals, hydraulics, what have you) but I want to know that they're there.As for FDE, they're usually not to my satisfaction so I make the aircraft behave the way I want them to behave. (Zen and the Art of Aircraft Customization.)P.S. Real men fly VOR to VOR using aircraft that have steam gauges.

Probably a lot of truth in that. Some years ago I came to the conclusion that you could learn to like anything if it has something even vaguely to do with a subject in which you have an interest. So you can easily be both types if you have something which unites them.I'm one of those poncy types who went to art college, spent years being a designer and copywriter in arty advertising agencies, before finally getting a job where you really actually had to do some work, when I went writing for a newspaper, which is not at all arty and is in fact quite hard. But hard or not, one thing both of those jobs have in common, is that they involve as little mathematics as possible, and that's no accident. I absolutely hated maths at school and did everything to avoid it, preferring all that poncy drawing and writing.But, when I finally got around to learning to fly an aeroplane, which was something I'd always been interested in, I found that I'd somehow mysteriously transformed into someone that could quite happily read about mathematical things, so long as they were a means to an end. That is to say, I'll cheerfully study trigonometry if it is related to offsetting wind drift to fly a specific course in an aeroplane. Similarly, when I got heavily into gliding, I discovered I'd actually enjoy reading scientific books about dry adabiatic lapse rates and all that kind of boring scientific stuff to do with clouds and updrafts etc.I still think I'm one of those poncy types, but I might actually be able to go on about the scientific side of things these days, albeit probably still in a poncy way.Al

Put me in the mixed column ...

I forgot to mention that the other aspect of me, the photographer, uses the W key to watch the scenery roll by. Sometimes I'll even kill all graphics card filtering in order to see the moving world in a strange modern-art-like way.

I'm a Romantic when it comes to flight simming. Having said that I listen to more Baroque and Classical music than Romantic. I hated maths, but I've spent all of my life working as an engineer. So I guess I am mixed, in a way.

I started purely romantic mostly enjoying smaller planes. a person i knew through music lessons gave me canadas flight instruction manual because he was taking his private pilot exam and we got talking about flying. so i went through it and really realised how much more you can do with flying with this knowledge. no the average simmer doesnt have to have every procedure for every plane memorized but it is fun to add a bit more realism.