I don't think you hate the game, however, there is a certain amount of snobbery going on, not just by you, but the PC Sim racing crowd in general. That snobbery is hurting the viability of Sim racing as a legitimate big ESports. Statements like "Invest in an inferior setup in most cases........these they can't change the FOV and the physics are far inferior on every level" just demonstrates what i said. Yes, GT is not Rfactor 2, doubt anyone is claiming that. What exactly should it be simulating to bring our royal highnesses to the game? would actually like to know.
I'm reading my own words and you are right that I'm sounding "snobbery" and I should try harder to not come off that way (me and, as you said, many other sim racers as well).
About what it should be simulating. It's really not just "if they'd just do this and that better", it's really everything. GT is not simulating suspensions from individual geometry and if they did, they wouldn't have a modern tire model to simulate the effects of dynamic toe and camber. Dampers don't seem to be simulated on something related to modern damper curves, springs can be set to suuper hard in the game, but when you hit a curb, they're still really soft and forgiving. The allowed amount of travel of the wheel is huge in all cars, not seeming to simulate hard bump stops. I haven't really started, but I should stop here, because I can't think of a single technical thing that is simulated on a competitive level with current PC sims in GTS (I say current, but really rFactor 1 and Live for Speed did this a loong time ago). Some of it is hard to call simulation, the steering for example is the same game mechanic for all cars, there is no actual simulation of the steering levers and geometry.
I'm not a pro by any standard, but I imagine if a guy that has played and loved iRacing for years were to try GTS on a somewhat serious and competitive level, he'd get understeer and think "that's wrong, the brake balance here is understeery no matter what setting, that's some accessibility anti-spin bullshit", he'd spin and think "this crappy tire model loses 100% of lateral grip once the rear tires spin, who thought this was realistic" and be annoyed by the game, he probably wouldn't think "damn, I need to get better at this".
Trying to sound less snobby again, there are sims like pCARS1 that check all the "complex simulation" boxes, but doing a poor job in most cases - trying, but missing hard. GT on the other hand is just not really trying (Polyphony could probably make a better sim than the guys making iRacing, but they don't want to). They're making a realistic racing game that everyone with a PS4 can try and enjoy, not a complex real time vehicle simulation. And I think - despite my gripes with the (really bad, sorry) tire model - Polyphony is doing a good job with this game. Thanks to the rating system, the racing is fun and close and with the motion controls it plays better with a controller than any other racing game that is going for realism at the moment.
And on the competition level: If you're fast, then you're fast. Let the best GT racers play some iRacing and they'll be crushing 99.9% of the competition in no time, same would be the case taking the top iRacers and rFactor enthusiasts to compete in GTS. The real fast guys are usually fast across the board, even in Driveclub, PGR and Mario Kart they'd kick ass. Give them a real race car and they'll be doing very well there too (which many of course have already done).
