Michael Backes wrote on May 1^st, 2018 at 8:57pm:

The writing was on the wall. I hated the way the menu worked, regardless of what Alex Kuzmin said above, about the fact that you don't fly it from the menu, the menu is the starting point of the sim, and if I don't like it, it makes it harder for me to push forward to the flying part of the sim. Then there were the limited options available once you started flying, and this made the flying part less enjoyable, as virtually nothing could be changed once the flight was started.

Mathis Koch, of another company, had this to say:

"They should have done exactly what Lockheed did. (Licenced to DTG for use in ‘entertainment’ products, the MSFS engine is Lockheed Martin’s to use in the ‘serious’ training sim sector)

Step 1. Fix some of the nasty bugs that were in FSX for many, many years and release that version.

Step 2. Repeat Step 1 twice. This will get customers used to the new sim and make it bloody good.

Step 3. Make it 64-bit after the customers are hooked on the new platform"

And I think he was spot on. I guess we can hope that DTG still might do that, but I think that their being bitten by the failure of FSW, it is less likely to happen now, and that's really sad, because FSX still has a lot going for it, and it's still my preferred flight sim.