Disclaimer: I'm a sim game enthusiast and don't play any titles where the game designer can just change the gameplay mechanics and UI to work on screens with a low PPD.
I'm sorry but that sounds like pure snobbery. With the same PC running the game, and only changing the display, any game can be adapted to anything by changing gameplay mechanics and UI.
However, you are correct in the sense that most racing and flight sim folks tend to be entitled snobs who have spare money to throw around. Many have spent money on a RTX2080 Ti card when the non-titan edition could not run games in VR at high enough frame rates. Most are going to be upgrading to a 3080 as soon as it comes out this fall.
How are you defining a "systems-level simulation" in a way that it would no longer be one if run at a different PPD? I feel like there's something I'm missing here.
You mean in a week?
Looking forward to replacing my GTX 1070. Such an underpowered card to sit next to my i9-9900K and 32 GB of RAM.
Furthermore, the performance hit when upgrading to higher resolutions is negligible. Smaller pixel densities require heavy supersampling to look good whereas higher density displays can be run at or near their native resolution.
I got the rift in order to play it only to realize that learning DCS from the ground up requires a lot of keyboard input / referencing cheat sheets so need to be pretty proficient with it before you can't see your hands and as you mentioned the resolution is not quite good enough in rift to really see things with much detail though it is still a fun experience to try out.
Looking forward to playing it on a future headset.