The more screenshots we see if third party aircraft in the sim I see, a few things are clear. 
 

The visual quality of aircraft have been fantastic for a few years now, beating the quality of the default aircraft of the new sim in many respects. The issue is that we have been flying them around in an old generation world.  Imagine flying an fsx aircraft around in fs2000 scenery. 

Interesting analogy!

45 minutes ago, JohnH90 said:

The more screenshots we see if third party aircraft in the sim I see, a few things are clear. 
 

The visual quality of aircraft have been fantastic for a few years now, beating the quality of the default aircraft of the new sim in many respects. The issue is that we have been flying them around in an old generation world.  Imagine flying an fsx aircraft around in fs2000 scenery. 

Actually there were some 'old generation' features in FS which were removed in later versions, it actually went backwards in a couple of ways.

Anyone who has had all the versions of MSFS over the years will recall that there were water reflections on the tarmac when it rained in i think FS2002 if I remember rightly, and then they got removed in the nextversion version of the sim. Helicopter flight models got dumbed down a bit from one version to the next one, because lots of people claimed they were too hard to fly.

Much earlier versions of FS had a built-in dogfight game with a Sopwith Camel and there used to be an aircraft designer utility as well where you could create your own aeroplanes or modify the default ones. So it's not all be progress with newer versions of MS Flight Simulator.

4 minutes ago, Chock said:

Actually there were some 'old generation' features in FS which were removed in later versions, it actually went backwards in a couple of ways....

 

I remember tuning some nearby VOR frequencies in FS2000 and there would be static when you listen to the Morse code ID and once you got airborne and gained some altitude, the signal would clear up.

20 hours ago, Chock said:

Anyone who has had all the versions of MSFS over the years will recall that there were water reflections on the tarmac when it rained in i think FS2002 if I remember rightly, and then they got removed in the nextversion version of the sim. Helicopter flight models got dumbed down a bit from one version to the next one, because lots of people claimed they were too hard to fly.

I still fly with my FSX every now and then. Some of the aircraft I like, I don't have in P3D4.5. But the reason I am saying this is because my FSX, which is FSX-SE, still has the water effects on the ground when it's raining. I commented on this in the P3D forum because I liked that effect and missed it in P3D.