FWIW Cascade seems to be dead in the water, at least on the surface. I say this because I was exited as anyone else when they formed up, but no change, no word of work, and very infrequent outreach to the community is not the type of thing that gives me a good feeling. Microsoft ran an ad not too long ago hinting at development of a new flight sim, though. Can't find the link right now. But you can bet Cascade needs to go from scratch if they're planning a flight sim.X-Plane is very rough around the edges. While I can run FSX on a sub-par machine, I can adjust a bit to get decent performance. On the same machine, I cannot get greater than a few miles (if that) visibility, which X-Plane insists in doing, I suppose, to save frame rates - which are great. I think its fluidity is great for instrument performance as well. On my Mac (G5, dual 2-gig), though it's a bit older, I get the same thing - but with my fans spinning like jet engines. I also have lots of weird controller issues with X-Plane, such as sudden wild rudder deflection, inability to control with pedals, misreads on yoke deflection... not a game killer but it happens frequently enough to cause me to swear I'm going to give it up. Which I don't.Austin's comments on the user interface are wholly ridiculous, but nobody will be able to convince him to do what he doesn't want to do. He just can't see the forest for the trees on that one. You couldn't shoot a nerf gun at the interface screen without hitting something that could be improved, but I guess we'll have to live with that.One of the biggest issues I feel is hampering X-Plane is that there needs to be more tools to create (original) scenery quickly, and the tools need to be more user-friendly, such as Flight1's Instant Scenery.Would also like to see something like TileProxy. I think I did see a mention of some utility that may do something similar, but don't think it has the same support. As far as I'm concerned, being able to load up TileProxy and then place scenery on top of the satellite imagery is fantastic.

FWIW Cascade seems to be dead in the water, at least on the surface. I say this because I was exited as anyone else when they formed up, but no change, no word of work, and very infrequent outreach to the community is not the type of thing that gives me a good feeling.

+1