Gentleman, I may be pushing 76 but aviation has always been my first love other than my beautiful Wife of 55 years come June 10th!!! I'm a real pilot with a couple thousand hours of real flight time not to mention several thousand hours of simulated flight hours in Fighter Ace & Aces High. Question,,,is there any room in AH for us old folks that still think of VR is some kind of venereal disease? ~S~
To actually answer your question, jump right back in, it's as playable as you recall, and many do not use VR. The view system you remember from your prior time is the same; the game is very playable with a j/s and hatswitch, but may be more challenging, as it always was, to use keypad views.
My only suggestion might be to enlarge the FOV (field of vision) from the default 90 degrees to something that may give you a better overlap such as 100 or 105 degrees, the wider the FOV the more you'll notice fishbowl effects on the edges of your screen/vision.
Our mark II eyeballs have 120 degrees normal and an extra 10 or so peripheral, but monitors are the limiting factor here (that induced fishbowl effect.)
Aside from the hat/keypad FOV being adjusted, you may want to find better head positions than default, altho' default are very good still.
Having said that, some players think VR confers some slight advantages in certain situations like spotting GVs or tracking planes to better end up with a firing solution (seeing around those pesky canopy frames.)