I did not think of this possible fix.  My flight sim buddy Bill C put me onto this one.  I'll quote from a posting he recently made at our VA's Comments Forum.  My comments appear in italics & bold

 

Dan and I have had an e-mail discussion this week about Mega Scenery Earth vs the standard scenery, for me being Ultimate Terrain X.  Dan has many MSE full states and I have a few.  I imagine many of you might be on the fence about the product.  I use GEX, UTX & Cloud 9 X-Class landclass for my non-photoreal scenery.

 

I like UTX because it establishes correct coastlines, something FSX is very sadly lacking in.  Other products I use like Ground Environment X and Cloud 9's X-Class add buildings and even more terrain features that bring the somewhat barren FSX world to life.  So what to do?  I've begun doing this;  I start my flights with MSE off.  A simple uncheck over in the Scenery database is all it takes.  I take off and somewhere during my climb (between 2000 and 5000' is good) I pause, go to the Scenery Library page and check the state I'm flying over back into play.  It loads (it only takes a few seconds), and then I continue my flight with MSE on and the land below looks truly real.  When the time   comes to land, I uncheck it the same way.  The scenery library page can be found under the "world" header in the FSX menu bar.

 

 

 If I had landed with MSE on the flattened golf course would have looked like this (above)

 

 

 

but instead I turned it (the photoreal scenery) off and in addition to the golf course I now get trees and buildings that show up.  To me a much better looking close in look.

 

Seems to me Bill may have hit on a way to have the best of both worlds.  I've done it, it works and looks great, up close and from high above too.

 

 

 

I've been thinking of the same thing for quite a while.  I do something similar with Bluesky.  I don't load the photoreal grid for the airports I'm flying into and out of so that I have autogen around me.  Then, enroute, I get the photoreal.  Works pretty well too.

Not being real comfortable with changing programs during a flight, I did something like you say here, and that is for the MSE Wisconsin, where I have the central region airports, which are pretty good, compared to default FSX, but even putting that above MSE, they did not show up, only if I unchecked MSE, in the Scenery Library.........seems like there should be a way to put an airport in over the MSE, but so far have not found that answer.........if anyone knows let me, and others, know........thanks, B42L8