Well I hope the OP finds the addon's that are causing problems. It just go to show you some people like things clean and mean, and others like to load it all up at one time. Your sim, you do what makes you happy. And I didn't even know there were already 800 addon's, yes I did with flightims.to, but geez even in other sims I never added much, so clearly from this thread it depends on the person. For those that have 800 items and don't want to turn them OFF, just start the sim and go do chores, paint the house, wash the family cars, cut the lawn, maybe it will be ready for you, and most important not have an issue. It's a joke, kind of 🙂 You could always leave your sim up and running and never shut it down, if the addon's don't have conflict's 🙂

This is a very interesting thread. And I use Addon Linker and never have more than 20 items in it, and almost never have more than a few at a time, unless it is a multiplayer event with scenery for that day. After the event, I trash the scenery, and will download again if I ever have too. And I just bought a SATA SSD, and went from an average of 5-8 minutes load time to about 1:30 load time. Like I said, mine is mean and clean. And Addon Linker lets you NOT load the splash screens! And changing airports and aircraft now takes about 20 seconds to go back to the screen, versus minutes before.

Main thing is use the sim as you please! Everybody is different! Enjoy flying all your sims 🙂

BTW, your mileage may vary!

Thanks for your post. I admit that I am only testing MSFS right now but it is interesting to find out experiences of others.

I am a bit of an add-on collector, as I do like the best scenery and airports I can find, I am just a little concerned now that if I do go 'all in' on a new faster PC, I am still going to encounter long wait times if I want all my fancy addons included. i dont mind paying for good quality payware, but will I want to use it if the wait times are exceedingly long? 🤷‍♂️

31 minutes ago, chickster25 said:

I am just a little concerned now that if I do go 'all in' on a new faster PC, I am still going to encounter long wait times if I want all my fancy addons included.

It has always been the case that the more you add, the longer it will take to load. The simple answer is to amass as many addons as you wish but do not try to run them all at once.

50 minutes ago, Reader said:

It has always been the case that the more you add, the longer it will take to load. The simple answer is to amass as many addons as you wish but do not try to run them all at once.

That is part of my problem, in FS9 I was able to retain all my addons without too much of a delay when loading.

With MSFS, it would seem that this may not be possible, or I will have to expect significant delays as a result, which is a shame as I was hoping that it would have improved over time, not deteriorated.

17 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

This could easily be misread... load times are going to be the same, regardless of whether the actual addon folder, or a link is in the Community folder.  Disabling the addons that you are not using is what is keeping the load times to a minimum.. 🙂

You are correct. Thanks for the clarification.

3 hours ago, chickster25 said:

I was hoping that it would have improved over time, not deteriorated.

Addons have gotten a lot bigger... you did not have 4 GB addons for FS9.. 🙂