iRacing is worth the fact that it's 11 PM on a weekday and I can go jump into a full race in almost anything I want to drive. Be it a NASCAR or Formula race.
Fact of the matter is, for LFS, I had to plan my entire week around driving a single event on a saturday morning. An event that if I was 3 minutes late for, my entire week of prep and waiting was for nothing.
Things used to be better back in the CTRA days, where even in NA evenings things were pretty busy, but that's close to a decade ago at this point.
In iRacing if I'm 3 minutes late for a session, there's going to be another equally (or more) populated race in a maximum of 2 hours. I'm also matched with people who are approximately my skill, so I actually get to race WITH people and not just participate on the same track as others.
There's very few times and places where a race that I want to participate in either has 0 other competitors. Sometimes they might not go official, but there's still usually the other 4-5 cars willing to participate in a fun race (with people slowing up if someone spins and such).
Plus the endurance races, despite some of the blunders (44 incidents for a 24h race ), are still pretty much unmatched. Full day/night cycle with relatively realistic damage modelling (some shunts result in a car that's never perfect, engine damage eventually surfacing with a blown motor, etc) and a reasonable driver swap system works pretty good.
Sure it's expensive, but that was only really a problem 10 years ago when I was unemployed or making minimum wage. Now that I have a stable and well paying job, $10 a month and $10-15 per piece of content is literally fractions of an hour worth of time spent working. My entire month of enjoyment is covered by an hour of work. Pretty decent return on entertainment value (and it gets cheaper every month as I need to buy less and less content).
Also name another sim where you can end up in a session with active F1 drivers?
Steam is also quite unique in that it also offers regional based pricing, provided the publisher takes advantage of it. There's multiple zones in SEA and EU I believe for pricing.
Like it or not, Steam is still the best platform in terms of features as well as DRM for a storefront. It's up to you whether or not you actually want to interface with steam's API for DRM, there's countless other services available to a developer AND you can actually generate keys to sell on your own storefront to be distributed by Steam.
Steam knows that both the developer/publisher and the consumer are their customers. As a result, they treat both parties with respect.
Except that casual racing is literally non existent in North American timezones. The only way to get races is to wake up early on weekends or participate in league races.
The latter sucks because if you're 2 minutes late to qualifying, your whole week of practice is for naught.
Both of those factors basically pushed me into paying for iRacing despite my dislike for it. I can participate in races at any time of day with a >10 car field, especially in ovals.
The changing track temperature is interesting because it does add a decent amount of variance. I've been driving iRacing lately and it's fascinating how an overcast race is different to drive than a sunny race. Even ovals get made more exciting with changing track temps, becuase where T4 may be flat out in the clouds on worn tyres.. if the sun comes out you will lose traction and oversteer.
It's made oval racing quite entertaining, and other forms of driving also a bit more dynamic, rather than "hotlapping with other cars". The variance in lap times is also pretty significant based on weather.
Programming is an art form. You can't expect an artist to constantly produce on a single thing all the time, sometimes you need to work on something else to rest/gain inspiration.
Unfortunately Scawen's described the current state and there are 2 divergent branches of LFS. The currently public version and the version with new tyre physics (and I presume graphics). There isn't a "master branch" with feature branches for tyre physics and a separate branch for graphics that have been rebased with trunk frequently.
Scawen has stated he wishes to get back to a single master branch again, as currently any "critical" changes are having to be implemented twice, once in the public fork, and then again in the experimental fork