I am one of the guys who are
1. - Delighted with the game
2. - "reasonably happy" with the performance and features
Let me explain:
The graphics and attention to small detail is incredible. Probably 90% of this detail-depth will go unnoticed for most of us.
The damage model goes well beyond anything we have experienced so far.
On the other side the game is a graphics and performance monster. It eats any HW you will put to it for breakfast and asks for more.
It is my personal opinion (and 20years experience in the flight sim world) that, there is no hardware available today to make this game work properly so I am waiting for a year until the new graphics cards will have double the performance of today's top models and at least 3Gb VRAM so that I can at least enjoy some decent performance. Until then it will be compromises.
Of course some will say that "the game should be more optimised". Guys, forget it, they optimised it as much as they could by removing some things and making the distance radius of detail as small as it could become (that'why so many people complain about the "blocked houses"), do not expect too much "optimisation" more...
AND big kudos goes to kegetys who made theMOD and found the optimisations (which later became part of the graphics menu in the game), without his contribution we would still be playing at 15fps...
So, I have 70-100fps at 3070x resolution (not boasting you can see enough screenshots posted on my SLI thread) and no sound problems at all and I enjoy playing online.
I do agree that pretending that this was a game that would run on a min configuration of WinXP and DX10 was a very overstated idea....
Something else worthwhile bringing to your attention gentlemen is the retail price of the game:
This game costs approx 15.00 Dollars (this is the price you pay for it in Russia)
If anybody tells me that this is a waste of money for this product, I would advice him to a psychiatrist as his system of values has been seriously imbalanced (probably too many bankers' advice).
Why this game costs 50.00 Dollars (or 50.00 Euros) in other countries is interesting and maybe you can deduct who cashes in the difference (50 - 15 = 35)... No need for answers from marketeers thanks!
Still, at 50.00 EUR I would not accept that this game is a waste of money.
The only critisism I would make is that this game did not write: WARNING! You are about to spend hundreds of dollars buying new hardware in order to start playing this game and further hundreds of dollars buying more hardware a few months later!
This is my 2cents, as I said before, there are things I am very unhappy with the game (I can not fly Bf109 because of this stupid head restriction in gunsight mode, I do not have three monitors view) so please do not consider me being a "happy client".
But I am a "grateful flight-sim fan"
~S~