You can improve scenery and visual effects for little to no money however. Real Terra Haze is free and there are tons of good freeware airports. You can also use Ortho4XP and G2XPL to generate photoreal high resolution scenery and use the free HD and UHD meshes. That said Xplane does have quite a few issues. But I'll be fucked if I buy P3D.
There's a lot of high resolution textures and scenery available for X-plane. The only downside is they're huge downloads and the guy that hosts it doesn't torrent it for some ungodly unknown reason, except for one big one.
This video is made in 2016, why don't you add the 2016 addons with things like photoreal orthophotos or RTH or W2XP? These addons are amazing and absolutely free. Although X-Plane airports look really bad, there are a lot of very high-quality freeware scenery out there that are just stunningly detailed which makes X-Plane 10 a "cheaper" simulator in terms of money. About the HK scenery. There is a freeware scenery in the .org that includes the Hong Kong skylines along Victoria Harbour and also a very quality Kai Tak airport. Sadly, there is no good scenery for HK international but for absolutely no cost, X-Plane can look absolutely amazing! Also remember that Laminar Research is a very small company, and since the team is dedicated to make the flight simulator aerodynamics super realistic, the scenery is all up to the X-Plane community. In fact, the developers themselves have this planned that the airports are all done by customers as they made this addon called WED or WorldEditor. Then there is the X-Plane Scenery Gateway and that gateway is a place where user submitted airports will be featured in the next update if they pass the very strict quality control. Now at this current time, over 3500 airports have been submitted in the gateway and will be included in the next update. Keep in mind that in 2011 when X-Plane came out, there were hardly any scenery in the airports. I hate to do this but comparing to FSX, the quality of freeware scenery is far superior to FSX's scenery, however, FSX's payware scenery are slightly superior to X-Planes, which is where FS2XPlane comes in, it converts FSX scenery to make it work for X-Plane. So actually overall, X-Plane 10 including a lot of FREE addons is absolutely superior to FSX with a lot of free add-ons. Ok back to your point. Is it worth the 59.99? Yes definitely, if you are willing to spend around half an hour to install many gigabytes of amazingly realistic scenery for your simulator. But out of the box, i must agree with you, it is not worth it. Planes like the default Cessna are horrible and the scenery is just awfully depressing.
Hey, X-Plane 11 is coming out, so yeah. Its got a new C172, a new B737 and an updated B747! As well as new ground handling and traffic! A whole new lighting system which hopefully will fix the "sadness" in the X-Plane environment. Can't wait!
