Interesting discussion, and perhaps one that needs to be had.

 

Like the OP my first experience of the MSFS series was FS98. Since then the hobby has changed almost beyond recognition. Payware has eclipsed freeware and with the commercialisation of the hobby we've lost a great deal of what made it fun and enjoyable in the first place.

 

The entire hobby is now sucked into an orbit around the almighty $/£/€.

 

The OP's rant is a good one. There are a few devs out there who for all their obvious talent are their own worst enemies when it comes to their interaction with existing and potential customers. Then of course we have the devs who knowingly put out a shoddy or unfinished product, and in many cases abandon the product before moving on to development of the next one, leaving the hapless customers high and dry. As has been mentioned above, DRM - particularly in the form of fixed activation limits - is the bane of the honest customer.

 

Thinking about it more, just about everything wrong with the flight simulation hobby today can be traced back to the pursuit of the $/£/€.

 

Having said that there are still some excellent payware developers out there who deserve our support, and there are who I consider the heroes of our hobby - the guys who continue to make excellent freeware - like Manfred Jahn and team, Tim Conrad, Dave Garwood, Rob Richardson, and a few others. These guys represent for me at least, the true spirit of our hobby.

Although I've had to deal with mostly polite and helpful people, I think the real tragedy is the various futile copy protection and activation limits that comes bundled with the mostly overpriced addons out there. It really doesn't matter if the support folks are polite and helpful when it takes a week to install an addon because you have installed it one time too many.

I suspect the various copy protections cause more issues for paying customers than they ever cause pirates, who probably chuckle at them.

I've experienced some great support from most developers I've had to contact because of issues.

 

I could give you a shortlist (a very short list ...) of developers who, IMO, failed.

 

But the list of positives would be a huge one ...

I suspect the various copy protections cause more issues for paying customers than they ever cause pirates, who probably chuckle at them.

 

I am sure they do, and I sometimes feel like a sucker for not just downloading a cracked version of the addons I've bought, instead of going through all the grief, but my mama raised me good, so I'll keep on being an honest loser.

 

That said, I've cut my addon budget with over $500 this year because of it and enjoy some decent freeware instead. Also, I try to install most of my addons into a dummy folder and make a zip backup of them. That way I just unzip it into FSX if I need to do a reinstall. Works well for most aircraft, less so with scenery that makes a mess of your FSX files structure and cfg files. Microsoft should have locked the FSX folders from being tampered with and all addons ahould have been forced to be installed outside of the FSX folder structure. You know you are heading for a CTD when your FSX folders consist of more alien folders than default ones .