3 minutes ago, 109Sqn said:

But you're physically moving files on and off a drive. Add-ons Lineker simply deletes or creates a tiny symbolic link for each add-on - quicker and surely less wear and tear on the drives.

Addons Linker is also a really easy way to keep things organised and to check for duplication on an ever-increasing collection of add-ons, such as duplicate ICAOs or accidentally installing the same add-on in more than one location.

Yeah, and it takes like 2 seconds to open and 2 seconds to close. Convenience.

1 hour ago, St Mawgan said:

Yes, I would just move them out of the community folder, temporarily. Also kind of easy to do manually without needing to run a program first and have that do it.   

You are very far from the truth, AL allows you to categorize your addons (liveries/airplanes/sceneries by countries or regions/panels/AI traffic/Sea traffic/tools/assets, etc) so that you don't need to go through hundreds of files often identified in bizarre ways by their creators making them difficult to remember, all accumulated in one Community folder.

You can also prepare, if you wish, presets of sceneries for example. Dependencies associate two or three addons when one is selected (for example OMDB airport and Dubai city, or one aircraft and a GPS addon). When updating addon files, you avoid searching where is the previous version is,AL has it all sorted for you.

In short, Addon-Linker is the best way to organise your portfolio of addons and keep them up-to-date, regardless of whether - or not - it adds performance benefits of any kind. The initial work necessary to create your folder categorisation is paid back easily and speedily if you like to keep a tidy sim.

I assume everybody is aware that Addon Linker does not place any actual addon files in the Community folder. Rather, it places only links to those files in Community. This is a crucial distinction, because (a) links take up only minimal disc space, and (b) the addons themselves can be stored in a different drive from MSFS, which has obvious advantages.

Not all of us have super-duper systems with ultra fast CPUs and SSDs - so waiting up to 5mins to load up can get quite annoying.

For those of us that have collected masses of addons, the Linker provides a great way of organising them ... in-sim and into sensible physical locations. As another poster pointed out - addon authors often use bizarre naming conventions so identifying specific addons can be difficult - especially when applying updates to them, which could be a maintenance nightmare.

Here's my "system" for addons:
https://flightsim.to/file/14298/msfs-addons-linker-general-procedure