Well, me and my good friend managed to play shit like this when we were about 6 years old. WITH THE REALISM SETTING ON.

Jesus, this was back when the F-22 was barely just a thing.

As with anything tricky, it's simply a function of time and effort in order to gain mastery over it. If you have both of these things you can do nearly anything that you set your mind to. And that includes flying night time laser-guided bombing runs against enemy targets, whilst fending off Russian fighters and heavy anti-air cover, whilst at the controls of a super advanced aircraft that most people in the world didn't even know about yet.

The feeling once we scored that one-in-one-hundred chance of completing a mission? It was mother fucking fresh banana milkshake time.

People should play games to have the kind of fun they want to have. I don't get all the hand-wringing over whether or not kids have gone soft.