It occurred to me that Aerofly's "orthophoto only" approach to scenery might hold back payware development of airports and cities.
The commercial FSX / P3D / XP developer can develop an airport, city or area and not care about the underlying ground scenery. Either the user will see land-class based scenery, or they will have downloaded their own orthophoto scenery.
The commercial Aerofly developer has to source orthophotos to go with the area they're developing. Obviously for US, the problem is solved by USGS, but for most of the rest of the world, this will cost at least four figures, maybe five upfront with no guarantee of a return. Dealing with raw satellite imagery is also a massive time sink.
You'll note that most of the payware scenery we have now is developed for areas that have free orthophotos available.
I'm not suggesting that IPACS should do land-class based scenery, I agree with their ortho only approach, but it does seem like it makes the dynamic of commercial development for Aerofly different.
Personally I'd be happy to see "airport only, no orthophotos" payware, but that might be a hard sell to the average user.
Taking Norway for example. If there was a payware "Norway airports, plus pre-done cultivation, plus hand placed POI models, plus a high-res mesh, but no orthos", could that ever be an attractive commercial product?