Reading peoples wish lists for 2006 a few points spring to mind.MSFS has always been targetted at a broad market and as such is built to give a little of everything which will satisfy that broad market.The problem occurs with the hardcore enthusiasts who want ultimate realism and that sector have been catered for by the addon market.We talk of a realistic ATC yet is that really achievable as part of the main MSFS package?No, because to have a realistic ATC would involve a programme on its own.As part of the package it can only be a flavour of ATC to add atmosphere.I would like to see two releases of MSFS. A mass market version and a Pro stripped down version.The stripped down Pro version would be designed for the Hardcore simmers.It would come with No atc, No aircraft but would concentrate on the bare bones structure of weather and scenery and airport invironement.The structure would be there to accept third party addon aircraft and third party addon atc with some really neat utilities for adventure creation, weather creation etc.Ideally i would like MS to offer ATC world as an addon or to Hire the top aircraft designers to offer Aircraft world.The problem highlighted in a lower thread is that too much is expected from a mass market basic package and while there should be a mass market version there is room for a Pro version too.Peter

Well said Peter! william

As I understand it, the pro version was dropped for FS2004 because it split the market and meant that the overhead increased considerably for a very similar number of units sold. As a commercial company, wouldn't that be a counterproductive strategy?What they need is competition to make their product better, not a split version. The flight modelling can be improved as can the weather model. With current PCs, that could probably be done without limiting the "eye candy" too much. The clunky programming that so many complain about (seperate ground, air and water dynamics, plus dynamics that have nothing to do with the visual model) could be done away with as well, but why should they do it? Their only competition is X-Plane now, which sells a fraction as much as FS does. So they'd alienate most of their users - the ones that like to be able to use old add-ons with new versions - at the cost of pleasing the top, say, 10% of their customer base. Again, it doesn't make commercial sense.Ian P.

Well thought through comments. And, I'm guessing, since FS9 is such an excellent piece of work w/ booming 3rd party support, that all MS needs to do is tweak it appropriately to accomodate today's killer super-high transistor count GPUs, and if this can be done we will all happily sign up. They could sweeten the ATC with the obvious improvements (like you see in Radar Contact, but PLEASE retain the realtime programming versus the adventure issue. That killed RC for me.)I just pray MS does in fact deliver an FS2006 or 2007. We can only hope they don't make an inferior "upgrade" like Tiger Woods Golf did to their series this year. I was on the beta team and it was sad to see what they did with TW2005. I continue to play 2004, which is excellent in its own right, but the changes that came with 2005 killed a great franchise for me.Noel