"FlyingsCool" had some interesting observations about his first foray into X-Plane and I think they're worth restating away from the screenshot thread. So here goes:

It does look good, in some ways much better than FSX, in others much worse, but I am figuring it out.
I agree, I always thought that the ground traffic in FSX was pretty cool, but X-Plane has really expanded that by adding street lights, highway signs, bridges where the traffic actually travels over the bridge rather than under it, lol

My biggest pet peeves so far... Flight dynamics, I'm not finding as being any more accurate than FSX, unlike what I was expecting. Granted, I'm not looking at edge of the envelope stuff. This is merely standard take offs, turns, landing, taxiing, approach, etc.. Too me, controlling in flight is "game like" for most of the planes I've tried. Hopefully I can fix that by changing the sensitivity curves of my controllers? When I fly, a lot of the planes I've tried bob like a bobblehead and react to the slightest input immediately. The planes I've flown (Cessnas, Pipers, etc.) tend to react with some resistance so you have to anticipate when to stop with control input ahead of where the plane is. The planes I fly in FSX react closer to this than what I've seen so far in X-Plane.

I cringed when I read this part, lol. Not because I disagree, but because that statement would curl the hair of every hardcore X-Plane user and the owner especially. It is their belief that the system they use for constructing the flight dynamics is far more accurate than FSX and any statement in the forums to the contrary will get an immediate rebuff. I was told more than once that X-Plane is the "only" true flight Simulator. FSX and to a smaller extent P3D are games.

Handling in the water is horrible. Weather, haven't even touched that yet, but seems it's not there yet really, at least not without a bunch of work. The shore lines look HORRIBLE. Worse than FS out of the box, and that's saying something.
Yep, pretty accurate and water handling is something they continue to work on. As for the shorelines, there have been scenery artists who have done nice work in many areas to improve the shorelines.

I did try and get the Ortho4XP stuff working, but my computer crashes when I've tried to process the jpg's, so I'll have to figure out what's up with that, and that'll likely fix that problem? (My desktop is circa 2010 overclocked to 3.8 GHz, 2GB GTX 1050, 18 GB memory, Windows 7 Pro).
My understanding was that Ortho4XP can be very taxing on some systems and requires a pretty beefy setup to handle it. I've stayed away from it for that reason.

Point is... I've been using flight simulators for over 30 years, X-Plane is NOT plug and play if you have expectations similar to what you can get with FSX. There's very few planes where I trust the flight model to be accurate. I know I'll get there, but, for me anyway, it's not easy or straightforward, or ready out of the box, and figuring out what's compatible with my version (11.32) and getting it all working. It's a lot of work. Hopefully someday we'll get to a point where there's a standard setup so newbies can get up and going quickly.
I had hopes that X-Plane would mimic some of the setup requirements we see in FSX, but there's nothing similar about them at all and never will be. I wouldn't say they are Anti-FSX but they are their own entity and proud of that fact and even discussing "how you do it in FSX" will elicit more than a few chuckles. As you have shown in your statements, if you expect an easy go of it when moving over to X-Plane or simply adding it as an additional Sim, don't expect the transition to go smoothly (this varies of course depending on your expectations as a sim pilot or true certified pilot).