To be clear, I don't want to imply they're useless though. Velocidrone, DRL and Liftoff (I haven't tried Uncrashed yet) all have good enough physics for real us

To be clear, I don't want to imply they're useless though. Velocidrone, DRL and Liftoff (I haven't tried Uncrashed yet) all have good enough physics for real use cases, and are widely used. - As a beginner, they help you crash less. You can learn enough basics to save some real money in avoided crashes. The sims pay for themselves right away, you can just buy them all. The sim-isms don't matter so much. - As a skilled pilot, they help you crash more. You can safely iterate on your maneuvers really really well (no repairs, immediate retry from same conditions, always good weather, fly from home). You'll have an idea where the differences are and how you need to compensate with the actual craft. You can tune the virtual counterpart to be a bit closer. They complement real model flying, they just cant replace it. (And even that is questionable. I bet many just can't afford real model flying. Sims might help them scratch the itch.) A _really accurate_ flight sim is actually hard to do though, for a few reasons. Aerodynamic modelling is hard (there are lots of interesting effects), and that almost every model aircraft is unique (due to home building) and constantly changes (crashes, repairs, upgrades) probably doesn't help. And neither does that the core idea behind multirotors is unstable flight, which entirely depends on the firmware. There are different firmware projects (Betaflight is the most popular for racing, but not the only), and they are quite tunable. Can't simulate that accurately; it would have to be firmware in the loop.