Thank you, thank you. I tried to put a lot of research into the points before posting them to ensure I was coming off as somewhat well informed and logical. The responses thus far have been pretty solid and not flaming. When you're passionate about something you bound to defend it, and that's been pretty much proven by the replies.
My biggest counter-point obviously was the inability to play on-line against others. Sure Privateer and Elite didn't have those capabilities either so it only makes sense that fans of those games would enjoy the playing experience offered up by X2. But it also proves the point about comparing apples to apples at the same time. The X2 folks really focused on the joystick issue and hammered us pretty hard for being fans of FL. I did want to see how they reacted when they same difficult questions were posed to them about their beloved game. Same basic effect that had here (just not as beligerant as it was when it was our turn in the fire). At least thus far there's been some mutual respect adherred to from everyone in that thread. FL had MP playability from the get go (even though I'm still a little miffed there wasn't more enphasis put on the aspect during the beta process by the testers). If more focus had been done on the MP portion it would have only been better once it went gold. (believe me when I say I tried everything in my power to get others to focus more on MP). But as it turned out, the SP portion of the game is what got the most focus and thus the SP campaign turned out to bt pretty well designed and mostly bug free when it was release.
Case in point, only patch to be released for FL revolved around what? Server side issues...MP fix only. How many patches have been release for X2 now?
I can not wait until the On-line portion becomes a reality for X2 to have my chance to review that as well. "different game" be damned, they will need the same software to participate, just like FL and then we can truly compare apples to apples.