Just to clear this up: David (caledonianblues) has no business relationship to EW whatsoever. Granted, he's a very active player, moderator and does a lot of volunteer stuff for the community. But that's exactly what it is: volunteer stuff for which he invests his free time and his own money. Often enough he voices criticism towards design decisions or problems in here when he thinks it's necessary, so I cannot understand your statement above.SamJH wrote: but on the other hand, we could have expected this knowing your relationship with the company.
Regarding the comparison between tH and FSX... I'm sure David will have a few words to say. If there's any software that he knows as good as tH, it's probably FSX. I don't know much about it, but I have the feeling that you're comparing oranges to apples. The company you mentioned, OrbX, are not the game developers, they are just a small group making add-ons.
I lack the knowledge and experience to say whether the level of interaction between the community and the devs is "unprecedented" and I can see areas where it could be improved (some of which you mentioned), but from my limited experience there are a lot of software companies and game developers (especially the big ones) that do it much worse...