i think the flight simulator will teach you a lot among the most important is:

1. REACTING TO YOUR PLANE. the plane will often not do what you want it to... whether that's your real plane or your simulator plane. what you need to do is learn how to cope with that. instead of fearing that your plane isn't trimmed right, fly it out of trim then trim it out. there are many times i put all my trims out of whack and fly. i would NEVER do this on my real planes. but i would on my simulator planes because it helps me fly a poorly trimmed plane. trust me... there are many times that you will fly with a plane out of trim whether it be because of a maiden, a loose battery, a warped or loose wing, or just a mistake like dialing in the wrong model on your tx (i've had all those happen to me!).

2. ORIENTATION. simulators are usually flown on a small screen that once the plane goes a little further away, become inadequate in terms of detail. this is a great time to learn orientation of your plane based on the inputs that you input. when the plane is far enough away that you can't easily tell its orientation, you need to learn to determine the orientation of your plane based on how it flies on your inputs. then try to fly your plane back. this is critical in real life and simulating it on the computer will save you money. i've seen people that have literally flown their planes so far and unable to bring them back often thinking they are flying toward them when they're actually flying away. they ultimately lose them in the horizon and risk their plane hitting some innocent person far far away.

3. RUDDER USE. it's easy on the simulator to use the rudder to combat the wind. i often crank up the wind and try to land doing the crab. i often put the planes in a slide to slow them down. in real life, the only plane i've ever put in a slide is a trainer and my cub. and my it's great fun!!!

i recently purchased RF 3.5 and i'm surprised how easy it is. i'm a little perturbed because it think it's even more a video game than it was before. the stalls are predictable, the landings can be super harsh, everything is so easy. i'm like a pro in 3.5 when i was a beginner in 2.0. i think i fly okay in real life and do all the standard aerobatics but in 3.5 i'm able to hold knife edge like there's no tomorrow then go directly into a hover. sure i'm not doing it for hours (hovering) but i can hold a steady hover for five ten seconds before losing it. but rarely do i ever crash. i must say 3.5 gives someone a false sense of security. if i were go out there and try to hover a few feet off the deck, i'm sure my funtana would be a pile of splinters!

to keep myself entertained in 3.5, i purposely crash my plane to break off a wing, a rudder (that's fun) or the landing gear and try to fly around. completely unreal!!! so my caveat is that simulators, while useful, is, as everyone has said, just a simulator. learn from it what it can teach you and move on.

my two cents.