It took a year because you are a small dev team. Don't take me wrong. I love Aerofly. It got me in to flight sim and it keeps me there because of vr. I just worry about the future cause things are slow and there are some big players at the horizon with VR promises coming up. You are a small dev team and you have your pace and I've bought everything from all third party devs and the community must be one of the best out there. But I still worry. Ipacs will survive but only because of mobile... Hope I'm wrong❤️
A lot of the time for the development was spent on evaluating different approaches and parameters with real world pilots and real world flight data. It's not easy to obtain real world flight data and was quite time consuming. I don't think a bigger company would be faster here unless they really throw a lot of money at it and buy new equipment for horrendous amounts of money to be able to do flight tests in parallel. But they still would have to wait for the right weather conditions and would for the pilots to have enough time (or spend even more money). One could also cut corners in the product quality to speed things up but this is clearly not what we are doing. We put quality first and we try to do all things for the long run.
E.g. our graphics engine is running so quickly because throughout the entire development process quality was prioritized. And with that I mean code that is well thought out for the long run, scale-able, efficient and using modern techniques. You can't just blow up an old graphics engine and then try to optimize it and expect to get the same results.
To draw a parallel to airplanes:
One tactic would be to build a brand new aircraft using only the latest materials, latest engines and airfoils. This allows you to do everything right this time. Already drill in holes where you need to add something later, even though it takes time to prepare for the future. This obviously is not cheap and takes a lot of time for development.
The other option would be to keep the old design and put new engines under it. This second method involves moving the engines forward and up because they don't fit under the wings because the landing gear was not designed with bigger engines in mind. But moving the engines and the huge cowlings has unwanted side effects when s*** get's real and it get's harder to recover from a stall. You could then add a new feature to try and patch that problem which may lead to unwanted side effects or even crashes because you may not have enough time left before the "release". Then you need to add another bug fix to fix the first bug fix. But you can't redesign too much or else you lose "backwards compatibility" and the pilots will need new training. Of course you too have to make the cockpit new and shiny and add all the latest features. It has to look like a major step forward and state of the art.
And it probably is alright and safe to fly this re-engined aircraft once the initial issues have been sorted out. I'd be happy to fly it for the first time. But in the end the new design is much more efficient and uses way less fuel, has better handling qualities and is probably more user friendly in many ways. From the clean cockpit interfaces to the wider passenger seats to the easier maintenance at much longer intervals.
(Sorry for the long post. )