To answer the original question (better late than never?), I know of two of my former colleagues that are working on the new version at Microsoft. One was a technical art lead and the other started as a high school intern and became a test engineer who worked with me for a time. I'll let them decide if they want to share their names. I have no idea if any of the Asobo employees ever worked at Microsoft, but I'm fairly sure that, if they did, they didn't work on FS.
One other thing to point out in response to later comments in this thread: Aces wasn't some independent entity or group inside the company. We were all Microsoft employees who were lucky enough to work on Flight Sim full time. Long before the studio concept took hold at MS, we were called all kinds of things - SIMS, the Simulations Product Unit, a subset of the Entertainment Business Unit, then AC&S, which stood for Action, Combat, and Simulations, and then someone just changed that to ACES when we dropped the action titles. I know there are at least a few others that I'm forgetting that happened during my 11 years on the team.
The point being, we were Microsoft employees, and the informal and then formal nicknames they gave our team frequently changed around us. So it's not realistic to suggest that Microsoft should have worked with ACES to bring back FS, or to talk about the shutdown as if Microsoft and ACES were different entities involved in a negotiation or something like that. Like I said, in my 11 years, we had all kinds of names, but most of us didn't really care. If you had to give us a name, most of us just thought of ourselves as the Flight Sim team.
Anyway, I got hands on with the new sim last fall, and was blown away. In addition to my two friends, I knew Jorg at least by name back in my MSFS days, and have met several of the Asobo folks, and I'm deeply impressed, FWIW.
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