FSX was the same using St. Maarten as its showcase. I understand your train of thought and tend to agree it would make sense to include the whole world but I find it curious that we have no evidence of it being true. I wasn't around during the development of FSX, maybe someone could enlighten me if they showed ONLY screenshots of St. Maarten pre-release as they are with Hawaii now?

No, we do have evidence! From the December 8, 2010 MS Press Release:

we want to directly address the concern that by dropping the “Simulator” from the name, we’re dumbing down the experience. Quite the contrary! We’ve developed on the “simulation” aspect for many years and have no intention of losing that legacy

Can you imagine a scenario where Flight limits the simming area to Hawaii only not beeing considered a "dumbing down" by everyone? Cheers,- jahman.

Keeping legacy of FSX may be just pure marketing talk. I have seen many games series getting destroyed to attract mainstream games when developer is still claiming how they keep it so that also original players could enjoy it, and then all original players just forget the game and search for their kind of game from elsewhere. But whatever, if your explanation for Hawaii pictures only is right and Hawaii is only nice place out there I will stay with FSX and then later probably go with X plane. Also it saves from trouble with Windows Live

Legacy can be the pros and cons...Plus for maintaining compatibility with our current software/hardware (imagine no FSUIPC, no ASE, no EZCA, no MCE.....)Minus with resource-hungry (or CPU hungry to be precise), flawed engineBoth ways will be a challenge for us, virtual pilots and for dev teams

Can you imagine a scenario where Flight limits the simming area to Hawaii only not beeing considered a "dumbing down" by everyone?

I can imagine that; I could imagine that as long as it retains the full fidelity of being a flight simulator it could be justified as not being dumbed down regardless of the scenery coverage. I think you have the idea that you cannot have a simulator without the whole world being modeled, what about Wings of Prey, Take On Helicopters or even Aerofly FS, would you consider any of these simulators?

Who explores scenery in a Boeing 747?

Someone who hates small planes, loves Boeing 747s, and is quite happy to fly low and slow at 160 knots with full flaps, and the undercarriage down? Not exactly "by the book", but this is flight simulation, not the real world.Now, perhaps we can all get back to the point of this thread? Namely Aerosoft's FS? Poor solwell1 has seen his thread completely taken over by the AVSIM Mafia.

All valid points, except MS has no need at all to deceive!

It's not deceptive because they're not promising anything specific. So when Flight comes out and it's limited to general aviation aircraft with simplified flight physics restricted to Hawaiian airspace, and you get all indignant and say, "But your marketing said-!", Microsoft can smile and say, "We said that we would respect the legacy of Flight Simulator, and we did exactly that by making the experience of flying easily accessible to the average person. Ease and accessibility. That, to us, is the legacy of the Flight Simulator franchise."You see how this works?