I'm not bothered, but it seems that others want the eye candy!!
Yes, so do I in fact. I spend a sizable chunk of my FG time working on rendering, and I actually own a 3000 $ gaming laptop, because real time 3d rendering is my hobby and I spend a lot of time with it, so I want to be able to enjoy it properly.
The thing I'm not getting is - why is that a problem for
you? How exactly does that take away from your experience?
Do you think I would go and work on more realistic flight dynamics of an airliner I don't care about if I would not work on rendering? The fact of the matter is that I work on things I find interesting - that happens to be good visuals of the scene, that happens to be weather, and that also happens to be systems and flight dynamics of the Space Shuttle. That doesn't happen to be any airliner operation, I find them the most boring planes. But others like them, and that's just cool with me, we don't all have to like spacecraft.
I would suggest if you want better simulation of anything at the expense of graphics, switch off the graphics, use the old terrain (all developers are usually very concerned about compatibility with old hardware and keeping old features alive if possible) and improve things that are important to you - and stop complaining that others improve things that are important to them.