I'm not sayin it's Zaxxon but I guess I have to clarify every detail or somebody will end up offended. Seems to be the way of the world these days 
Guess I wasn't clear, if you got the impression I was offended. I was just adding in my $0.02.
I was just saying that while the DCS pony felt a bit more dynamic, I couldn't point to anything in AH FM that I would say felt wrong. If fact I was struck by how similar they felt. So if DCS is supposed to be the pinnacle of aerodynamic sophistication\fidelity, then, in that department at least, AH does pretty good in comparison. And flight fidelity is what AH cares about more than system\engine details.
Some people have said, perhaps not you, that AH is less realistic because it doesn't have all the engine management. That is not an invalid argument, but I think AH does a reasonable job. The stuff it leaves out may not be that important for a game. For DCS, if it is selling military simulators, then it is. Every switch and procedure needs to be simulated so that it is a useful trainer for their military customers. That is why they are so hyper on that stuff. I used to think I'd hate that stuff, and in a MP environment I don't necessarily want to go through a long cold-start procedure, but offline I found I do like learning every single component of the Apache and including learning the whole startup procedure.
IL2 has AH beat on graphics. DCS has IL2 beat. AH has them both beat on the sandbox MP server design. Rock, paper, scissors.
I worked a bout a year pretty intensively with the AH mission Editor and AI system. I've spent the last year working pretty intensively with the DCS mission Editor. I've played around a bit with the IL2 Mission Editor a while back. To me, one of the core differences between them is you can see that originally DCS and IL2 were designed as single-player games with a constrained coop mission capability. By that I mean they were meant to have a private server setup and some squaddies would log in and when everyone was ready you'd start a mission and it had a beginning, a middle, and a end. AH was designed fundamentally as a monolithic MP server design with open ended sandbox gameplay and has a little bit of offline capability tacked on. They approached the current situation from two different directions. It shows down in their innards, in their underlying DNA. It is difficult to do something single-player in AH (no concept of a campaign for one thing) and it has proven an effort for DCS to move toward large scale sandbox MP, but they are moving in that direction.
Jason Williams stated in an interview that he knows from his data as the producer on the IL2 GB series that the vast majority of their customers were single-player. That is what got them a huge player-base and generated the majority of their revenue. That is why he is starting with SP, but knows that adding full sandbox MP is an eventual goal, so at least this time he is going to make sure that as they proceed they keep the MP design consideration front and center even as they design the initial SP so they don't end up with the limitations they had in IL2 that player-base has been trying to work around (DCS had same problem. Players have been trying to work around the core limitation, but they do have a powerful scripting system to help).
I think they are all fine sims. They each have advantages that the others don't (not that they can't). However right now DCS has the momentum, hype, and mind-share, and revenue. Money makes the world go around. That gives them leverage to get things done and development is ongoing. Feels like AH was back in the day. IL2 and AH feels like things have stalled. Enough revenue to keep their chin above water, but not enough to continue forward movement.
Combat Pilot is the dark horse worth keeping an eye on, but years and years and years away from being a serious player.
$0.02.
