4 hours ago, pmb said:

There are some P3D South African airports available from a company whose name escaped me, but they look so poor that I couldn't decide to buy any of them.

There's a Johannesburg scenery being worked on by a new, one-man band developer, allegedly releasing this week. But who knows? It has been delayed a few times already.
There are in fact two versions of FAOR already, neither are to a quality I would pay for.
 

1 hour ago, w6kd said:

They are theoretically supposed to release HTKJ (Nairobi) this year, although that was originally supposed to release in Q3 of 2018 and has been slipping like Oliver Hardy on a banana peel ever since.

[...]Slipping a project repeatedly over the course of years like FSDG's Nairobi is a good example of that.  They were steadily producing some good P3D sceneries, but seem to have become mired in quicksand.  I rarely even bother browsing their site for a sniff of something new any more.

FSDG's re-adjusted timeline and new projects like XP scenery and Hurghada appearing out of nowhere ahead of interesting African airports such as Nairobi, Casablanca and Marrakesh, (notwithstanding the drop in detail and technical capability compared to their Heraklion and Nuuk days, as well as compared to other developers' abilities), has also caused me to lose interest.
 

1 hour ago, w6kd said:

Which brings to mind a corollary of the OP's original premise about P3D developers shelving P3D development.  If you're a developer, the quickest way to get people to abandon you is to let them think you've abandoned them.

Even high-quality developers can be bad at managing their customers' expectations. FlyTampa took 2 years between the first screenshot of KLAS to release to market, with very little in between. An OMDB update, LGAV v2 and KATL have all been announced, yet no screenshots of any so far.
Perhaps JustSim's method of announcement, followed by release very soon after, is the best way to keep us punters happy?
 

24 minutes ago, Avidean said:

I'd be inclined to suggest that MSFS need accommodate backwards compatibility for only 2 classes of addons. Aircraft and Airports.

A compatibility mode of the aircraft model is the only backward compatibility announced to date.
Given how heavy on resources glass cockpit gauges have been so far, perhaps a re-write of these to make them less intensive on our CPUs is preferable?
 

38 minutes ago, F737NG said:

FlyTampa took 2 years between the first screenshot of KLAS to release to market, with very little in between.

That's because they're smart