For what it's worth, I was finished (mostly) with grad school and I lived in a little 2 bedroom apt. near Milwaukiee WI when Real-WX for FS5 was birthed and subsequently when the first ideas for an open-source flight simulator were being discussed. Then I was back working full time for the Mechanical Engineering dept. at the University of Minnesota when FlightGear really got rolling.
I've seen a couple reality shows about groups working on technical stuff (i.e. Prototype This!) but those guys were doing a new different project every week or two and they were making physical stuff that blinked and moved and did cool things. A FlightGear reality show would be mostly of a bunch of people staring at a computer screen and madly typing, debugging, doing odd jobs around the neighborhood to afford a better video card, etc.
A good reality show producer can probably make anything interesting, but then we'd be spending more time on crazy hair styles and awkwardly scripted and acted practical jokes. Some of the UAV work I've done might be interesting as a reality show ... if we were able to condense about 10 years of work into 5-10 minutes of only the really interesting stuff. We've had 4 or 5 really spectacular crashes. One involved flames and a 50' smoke plume, one involved a crash into the ocean where aircraft was recovered, but completely shredded. One involved tangling with our bungee launch cord and getting spun into the ground ... oh, and the other one was a high speed unintended dive that produced excessive aerodynamic forces preventing full elevator motion preventing a recovery ... speed increased until flutter broke the wing mounting bolt off, and the whole wing then walked it's way off the mounting spar and with about 80' altitude to go, everything came apart. Sadly I have no video for any of those events.
On the plus side, one of my aircraft (a Senior Telemaster that first flew in 2007) is still flying. Yesterday I logged my 2000th nautical mile of flight. I've logged 199 flights and am 13 minutes shy of 5000 flight minutes. That's not a lot for a full scale airplane, but is pretty good for an RC airplane, especially one that has spent it's whole lifetime being used for first line testing of autopilot code changes.
(having trouble making this show up inline, but here's a picture ...)
http://goo.gl/photos/bMzVTPTAk7MXbKBK6I've mentioned this before, but the UAV autopilot system I fly is built on top of FlightGear's configurable autopilot system and uses the same velocity form PID code, runs the same property system, and has inherited quite a bit of other FlightGear code. It's fun and cool to see this all performing in real life in real time on a real aircraft.
Regards,
Curt.