One observation on realism... as a group, I and a couple of other many-planed guys I know demonstrate something interesting about realistic flight characteristics...

If we all have the same plane, mine will always weigh least, accelerate and manuever best with the recommended power plant, and land easiest... Flyer-R's plane will always have the median weight, the biggest engine, the wildest flying characteristics, and the most aerobatic capability... and Flyer-S's plane will always be the heaviest, the slowest to accelerate, and arguably the best suited for inexperienced flyers.

If you flew an exact simulation of any of these airplanes after flying any other of the airplanes, you would say the simulation's performance is unrealiststic -- and you'd be right, sorta. That means that a perfect simulation of the plane one guy flies can be a really bad simulation of the next guy's plane of the same type. So unless the simulation does a remarkable BAD job, it's really hard to say that it's any more or less realistic than any other (at least as far as simulating flying behavior goes).