Yup - just as I called it based on previous articles I had been reviewing over the past year...and a major disappointment for the sim community. Microsoft simply wanted to attract the "gamers" as they felt that is where the money was and they gave no consideration to the flight sim community at large today.
I likely won't be looking at it anytime soon and will focus my own efforts on FSX. There are many a good developer out there that will seriously support FSX moving forward for quite some time as it appears this is the last version from Microsoft that will truly support the community as we know it.
Prediction for the future??? One of 2 things:
1) Microsoft after a few years will see the failure in this and shunning the FS community and so they start to allow 3rd party developers to publish via their store. As well, they start to see the integration with the community and allow some SDK integration for things like Squakbox, FSInn, etc. If this ever happens (serious doubts here) it will be some time.
2) Start looking at the X-Plane series as a solid alternative as I am pretty sure developers are going to start taking a hard look at this in the future. Once they have a really stable way integration Squawkbox / FSInn / some other approved Vatsim client you will see this product take off a lot more. It has been evident already by the number of software addons (aircraft, some scenery) already being developed over the past year or so and I only seeing this picking up speed. We will need to start the discussions with the PHPVMS developer (this is what runs the CVA Acars for logging your flights / date / etc) to see what his plans are for XPlane integration. With any hope he will focus on this and open up new doors for our many pilots here at the VA.
It's going to be an interesting ride over the next year to see where the sim community direction goes but my bet is on FSX being the mainstream software for at least the next year until XPlane takes off (no pun intended) in the Vatsim community.
Cheers!