To be fair, the issue discussed here is a relatively "recent" one apparently - IMO, testing things using the minimal startup profile was well-intentioned.
Still, in this particular case, our wiki doesn't yet necessarily a lot of useful information for people less tech-savvy. In fact, it would be a good idea to update our troubleshooting resources accordingly. When I came up with the "minimal startup profile" it was to help people provide better debugging information - obviously, not all our resources are applicable for every problem, so people may have to try different things and report back so that we can -try to- draw conclusions.
There's roughly 5-12 "power users" here who tend to help people with troubleshooting things - unfortunately, our time is limited and getting involved in forum discussions is a pretty tedious and time-consuming process - which is why I'd like to re-encourage these people to help maintain our troubleshooting resources on the wiki, so that we can grow a library of troubleshooting tips there, and merely need to post a link here and maybe adapt/update things over time.
In summary, FlightGear is far from being perfect - but even in a perfect world, we need much more, and much better, feedback - feedback that is actually actionable - otherwise, FlightGear will continue for the exact minority of power users and contributors/developers who bother to provide feedback and do RC testing - simply because that's then the "baseline" that FlightGear is benchmarked against. This isn't meant to sound harsh at all - but no matter the kind of product or service: people cannot expect things to be improved according to their requirements if they fail to provide adequate feedback to make these changes happen. Now, I do fully understand that this process is also pretty tedious for non-developers - but any other bug reports are usually just "pointless", i.e. cannot be acted upon.
Obviously, "threats" in the form of statements like "...will have to delete FlightGear" are also pointless: for us, and any other contributors, doing so just means that we will have more time to spend helping others who bother to provide proper feedback - equally, with less users (especially non-contributors) abandoning FlightGear, there will be more manpower available for things that we're interested in, i.e. more development time - and less time spent supporting end-users. Thus, it doesn't make any sense at all for anybody to state here that they're considering to abandon FlightGear due to some circumstance - it doesn't even work that way if you are having major stakes in the project, as could be seen in a number of instances where long-time contributors -including core developers- also switched to "drama queen" mode in response to some development.
As unfortunate as this might seem to some of you, this also makes FlightGear stronger in a way, simply because there's an inherent "stability" due to all the inertia involved in the project.
But please don't just expect FlightGear to magically improve just because you decide not to use it - even X-Plane is primarily shaped by its community of users - and it's mainly people who bother to provide actionable feedback that get to shape things, not people who are simply frustrated and delete stuff.