MSFS 2020 Downloading issues and First impressions

It took me a week to complete the downloading process, but I finally seem to have all of the required content. The download is enormous, 1 gigabyte for the installer and the executables, and 100 gB for the aircraft and scenery files. I ran into constant crashes during the download, and discovered there is a serious bug in the downloader: if the download is interrupted for any reason, it won't pick up where it left off: you have to delete the most recent file, then restart the downloader. Eventually, on the last day, I thought to take a look at the Windows Event logs, and realized that the downloader was crashing due to OOM problems: you can't download MSFS 2020 and be doing anything else on the computer at the same time, especially not anything involving the Firefox browser. I have 64 gB of DRAM in this machine, yet it's running out of memory? Anyway, on the last day, I started the download and then left the machine alone and found other stuff to do; I got 55 gB that way with no further issues. NOTE: This was the Premium Deluxe package.
After the download completed, I had trouble running the program with the default settings. The hardware is a Ryzen 5-3600 CPU (6 core/12 thread) on an ASUS MoBo with the X570, PCIe 4.0 chipset. It was a $150 mobo, not the most expensive, but also not a piece of junk. The GPU is an ASUS Radeon RX5500 XT, with 8gB of VRAM. Again, a mid-level GPU at $200. I'm driving a 4K center monitor and a pair of 2K side monitors off it. I've had no trouble running FSX on this setup with side-window views and auxiliary instrument panels. My hardware is well above the minimums for FS2020, but not cutting-edge.  The bottleneck, as you probably are guessing, is the GPU. I guess there's a reason that the top-end GPU's are $800, and FS2020 would probably run better on one of those. Initially the game would load, and I could select an aircraft and flight plan, but then it would crash a few seconds after clicking on "Fly".
Having a decade of experience with FSX, I didn't panic - I went digging through the graphics settings, and found the defaults out of the box are all "Ultra". I toned these all down to "Minimum", and began the process of ramping things up slowly, watching the GPU diagnostics which were running on one of the side monitors. FS2020 looks pretty bad with the graphics set to minimum, worse than FS'98 did, in fact. But the planes do fly, and I got 60fps without pushing the GPU much past 50% utilization, or heating it up enough to trigger the cooling fans.
Ramping the graphics up to Medium, makes the game look significantly better, not as good as the Trailers we've all been seeing on YouTube for months, but better than FSX. But the impact on my GPU was significant: Utilization was in the 90% range, and the GPU fans both had to run at 50% speed to keep the chip temp below 50°C and the junction temp below 75°C. I also couldn't get 60 fps at this setting, and had to drop back to 30. Eventually, I settled on disabling the grass and shrubbery, setting the ground traffic to zero, and setting the AI aircraft to about 25% of max. I wanted the flying environment to look as nice as possible, with the instrument panel clear and sharp, and the ground colors and textures from low and medium altitudes to be reasonably close to how they'd really look. I managed to find settings that make the game graphics much nicer than FSX, but apparently, I simply will not be able to get the "Ultra" graphics look of those Microsoft advert trailers on my hardware, unless I spend the green on a more expensive GPU. My Ryzen 5-3600 CPU is fine: I've not seen it exceed 25% utilization running FS2020, and that's only on 4 or 5 of the 12 processing threads. The game uses no more than 12gB of my 64gB of DRAM. So it's definitely the GPU that's the issue. This game has a monstrous appetite for GPU capacity, apparently.
Once in the cockpit and ready to taxi, the fun begins! Default startup is just like FSX: the game puts you at the end of the runway you selected, with the engine running. However, the default fuel quantity appears to be only 50%. Don't forget to gas up unless you are just going to do some touch-and-goes. The 50% fuel load appears to be for all aircraft.
I haven't tried all the planes yet, but the ones I have flown, the Shock, the 747, the Pipestral, the C-172, and the Icon amphibian, are all fun. The Shock appears to be a Slovakian-made bush plane similar to the old Piper PA-150 Super Cub. It has Fowler flaps and leading-edge slats, and a crazy-slow stall speed around 35 knots, with tundra tires. It's slow, but fun to fly, and you can fly it off any ground surface that's reasonably flat, no runway required. The plane is very light, 650 pounds dry, so even though the engine is only about 100hp, it has a very short takeoff roll and a surprisingly good rate of climb. As far as I can tell (without being a real-world pilot) the 747-800 behaves much more like a real airplane than it did in FSX. The autopilot is different than that of the 747-400 in FSX and will take some getting used to. The instrument panel is beautifully detailed, but most of the dials and controls are non-functional, just there to give you the complete illusion of a 747 cockpit. The engine and background cockpit sounds of all the planes I've tried so far are much better than in FSX, much more like you would hear in a real airplane.
One big difference from FSX: Runways follow ground contours now, like they do in the real world. Forgetting to set your parking brake can result in your plane rolling away, backwards, down a slope, while on the runway.


My only complaints so far:
1. The Slew mode is far less functional than it was in FSX, where you could move your plane in tiny increments of just a few inches. The shortest distance that you can slew a plane in translation in FS2020 appears to be several hundred feet, unless I'm missing something.
2. No water effects. The Icon amphibian doesn't kick up any spray when you land it on water. I set it down on Sproat Lake in British Columbia and watched on the external camera views to be sure, and saw no water effects. Maybe there is a setting for it that I turned off when I was trying to find graphic settings that worked?
3. No way to have multiple view windows. This is a big disappointment, but given that my GPU is struggling to just run one view window, maybe this game is just too intensive to run multiple windows like FSX could. 
4. To stream scenery data off the Internet won't be practical for me. I used nearly two gigabytes of data in 3 hours of experimenting. I'd bang into my ISP's monthly data cap in a week if I left this feature on. I think I will have to pre-download and cache scenery for the places I'll be flying the most. Hard drive space is cheap, data streaming incurs expensive penalties for going over the monthly caps. Fortunately, this feature CAN be turned off, and the game's built-in DTM and scenery files appear to be accurate and more realistic than they were in FSX. That said, the ground texture and color you get off the data stream is beautiful! I spent some time flying around Death Valley National Park, flying out of both Furnace Creel (L06) and Stovepipe Wells (L09), and the Valley looks WAY better in FS2020 than it does in FSX. The only problem is that the autogen is putting too much green in the ground colors. The Mojave Desert isn't that green.
5. No gliders. I know that incorporating helicopters into the game is going to take some time, but couldn't we have had a real sailplane in this initial release?
6. No on-screen display for sim rate if you speed up or slow down the sim. I saw the message "Sim rate limited when using autopilot", same as FSX, but what sim rate is it exactly when you see that message? There's no way to tell that I can see.
7. No GPS in several of the planes. In FSX, if you knew what you were doing, it was easy to add the Garmin 500 GPS from the FS9 cab file to any instrument panel in any aircraft. I really, really hope that user-modification and addition of instrument panels will be available eventually in FS2020.