1 hour ago, bean_sprout said:

To be honest, even if I had the perfect Wx engine - I wouldn't use it.  The reason is that I dislike real world Wx so much.  I prefer to use Themes and especially the ORBX ones and tweak them to my liking.

Cheers
bs

Lot's of people like it that way. It's fun and you get pretty clouds to look at and fly through. There are others that want to calculate fuel burn, time to climb etc and need accurate winds and temps. Others ( like me) tend to use historical weather and find severe weather and practice approaches.

IMHO, the last two require the accuracy of ASP4 but for general flying around pretty clouds, use whatever you think looks good. Some people use default clouds and love them.

That's why we have several developers in the field.

Vic

9 hours ago, bean_sprout said:

To be honest, even if I had the perfect Wx engine - I wouldn't use it.  The reason is that I dislike real world Wx so much.  I prefer to use Themes and especially the ORBX ones and tweak them to my liking.

Cheers
bs

I understand but as Vic said that it why you should get a weather addon that offers historic weather. Themes have various drawbacks. They give you one type of weather: with an Orbx theme you won’t fly from one kind of weather into another which can be pretty boring imho. And unrealistic. Weather always changes over time and from place to place. Also, you always know what to expect when it comes to for instance wind direction or baro settings. You will never ever be surprised. And weather from for instance Active Sky quite often is a LOT more ‘complicated’ and varied as a theme: themes often have just one or two layers while a good weather engine can give you extremely complex conditions with multiple layers and variations that change all the time.

With Active Sky you can pick a historic date and if you don’t like what you see you simply pick another date and the weather will be changed in seconds. Regard it as a random theme creator. But then with complex weather that changes all the time, even during a short flight.

Imho a (good) weather engine is the most important addon for a flight sim apart from plane addons. I have flown for years without one but the day I started using one may have been the biggest day of my simming career. It was a total game changer and it entirely changed my way of simming. 

BTW This is the main reason why I stopped using Aerofly FS 2: the lack of weather. A sim without good weather isn't a sim imho. After all the main thing you have to deal with as a pilot is the weather!