FSX is very good if you have money to burn, it's also a totally different kind of thing and comparisons are not really valid apart from the purely technical stuff.
What i like to do with FSX is play virtual tourist/millionaire/small air service operator/etc, depending on whether i'm flying learjets from London to Paris or dehavilland floatplanes near the glaciers of Alaska.
I'm just immersing myself in a situation that fools me into becoming someone else for a couple of hours, it's the escapism factor from real life that drives us to play computer games anyway.
It's just that this virtual persona is not a combat pilot for a change. So, how is that vastly different and nerdier than what we all do when flying IL2, where we pretend to be not only fighter pilots, but also pilots from 60 years ago?
In civilian sims i've done short hops in piper cubs taking off from my home town and landing on top of snowy mountains or in nearby small lakes, but i've also done a 10 hour flight in a catalina across the Carribean sea tracking from VOR to VOR (Bermuda-Cuba-Dominican Republic-Haiti-Puerto Rico-St.Maarten) exchanging the controls with a friend every couple of hours like we were a real pilot/copilot crew. Ok, we "cheated" and saved mid-flight, picking up from where we left off a few days later, but the aim was to have fun so it was a choice between using time compression or breaking up the flight in more sessions with the help of saved games.
In any case, stock FSX is not much to write home about, but it has awesome modding potential. It's just the basis. The real fun is in the 3rd party stuff.
I don't know about you, but i don't have FSX and only fly it on a friend's PC sometimes (the one i did the 10 hour flight with).
Well, the stock aircraft didn't impress me much but after flying some well made payware add-ons and learning how aircraft really operate, i couldn't bring myself to fly IL2 for weeks.
I'm not slamming IL2, i still like it but it's a 10 year old sim.
The thing is, nobody can deny that IL2 models how planes fly and shoot each other down better than FSX, but much in the same way some FSX add-ons model the actual complexity of aircraft better than IL2. Way better i might say.
And guess what, if this didn't matter then the Maddox team wouldn't want to include such things in CoD. But they did, so it must be important stuff
In fact, i have a feeling that one of the most interesting things to observe in CoD will be the initial reactions from people who've been for years conditioned to just slam their throttles forward and keep them there until the fuel tank's dry, thinking that this is actually realistic. I guess it will be time to learn some new tricks or turn down the realism options a notch for most of us.
In short, my point is don't knock it till you try it and even then, just because it might not suit you doesn't mean anyone who likes it is a fool. I guess it's just a combination of a dislike toward microsoft's practices and the lack of combat in FSX, but it manifests itself in an awfully short-sighted fashion, a way of viewing the hobby that prevents you from learning new stuff.
For example, i don't fly modern sims. I don't like them enough to sit down and learn them, they are too complicated for my taste and there's not enough up-close action when everyone has missiles. However, you won't see me going around telling people who like DCS: Black Shark that they're idiots, nerds who push buttons or useless in virtual flying because that chopper has got a gazillion autopilot modes. Nope, in fact i'm getting intrigued by thinking what draws them to actually sit down and learn how to do it, plus by the way it's actually getting done. I don't fly such sims, but i do watch videos of them on youtube that show how to operate a modern, highly complex warplane because
i like learning stuff about flying machines.
If some of you can go beyond your dislike of microsoft and the lack of combat and watch some tutorials for FSX add-ons, maybe you'll learn something new as well and not cook your engines in 2 minutes the first 10 times you try flying CoD at maximum difficulty settings