Of course they can....if they can go through the starting procedure, warmup procedure, taxi procedure, proper radio procedure, get it off the ground, keep it trimmed correctly, maintain proper manifold pressure, prop pitch, oil temp and radiator temp and a bevy of other tasks. After that, pray your CPU isn't melting and your GPU isn't crossing the bounds into cold fusion. Finally, finding the one other non-AI pilot in the arena and you're set. I'm sure there's an 88 page manual in convenient .pdf form to speed things up.
Kidding (mostly) aside, it is a beaut and I hope the dudes who like that kind of fidelity and realism enjoy the hell out of it.
I still prefer to just play at flyin' and dying-not simulate it.' I just want to fly and die in a Hog at least 15 times an hour without worrying too much about tasks and procedures. I know many, many people enjoy that stuff and good on 'em, I think it's great and keeps the WWII virtual combat genre going. I'll keep trying to get better at this game and enjoy watching the fidelity sim-nerd stuff on the side-I subscribe to maybe 1.3 billion flightsim channels on Youtube so I'm good to go.
Yup, she's a beaut.
The Corsair does look nice. I like to wait until that first quicky patch they always come out with soon after an initial release.

Like every piece of software, AH included, it can have some rough edges on first release. Did AH have VR controllers working perfectly well in the initial AH III released on Steam? Living software, has bugs. AS new code gets written new bugs are created. Humans can't write code without creating bugs. You know what doesn't get bugs? Dead things. Abandonware. Over time, existing bugs get whittled down and new bugs are not created because there is no new code to create new bugs. Personally, I'd rather live with some mess and a pulse.
AH certainly has a flavor of gameplay not quite reproduced anywhere else yet, but I just never understood the video game as religion impulse. There is nothing immoral or unfaithful about enjoying the things each game can offer that the other can't. It's a logical fallacy to think it has to be an either\or, or that flightsim enthusiasts better hide their appreciation of multiple games or face the wrath of the sisterhood!
I agree with you on the system management load. I don't mind all that stuff in SP or Campaign, in fact I enjoy geeking out to it and really delving deep into a study sim of the p-51 or spitfire, etc. But no, on a MP server I want that toned down because that is between me and the aircraft and doesn't require I be on a MP server to enjoy that. I want to spend my limited MP time doing the things you can only do with other humans in MP, I can geek out on startup procedures playing my offline Reflected Simulations campaigns at 3am.

However, once again, I do feel obligated to point out that all that (well most all) can be controlled by how the admin decides to setup their server. If a server admin wanted to setup their server with hot starts, icons, runway, air starts, limited engine management, etc, etc, all that is configurable by the server admin.
If you really wanted to you could set the FM to arcade mode too. It's all up to the server admin and what kind of server they want to run.
DCS is a resource hog. There is no denying that. Not as bad as people like to pretend. It can be if you desire every single graphical widget turned up to max. If you want it to look like that, you can make it look like that if you want to spend on the hardware.
They'll let you spend as much as you want.

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Animl, you don't dictate to me what I post, where, or on what topic.