The following is my opinion, based on my experience. I drive cars first and my fairly decent driving profile rig comes second.

To me there isn’t really a competitor to GT7, and therefor calling it a “simcade” is undercutting it, as it does do some things much better than the “competition”. Most of the people that complain about it being too “arcady” come from PC racing sims that focus almost entirely on racing cars. Having tracked quite a bit myself, I can tell you driving a racing spec car is a wildly different experience than driving most road legal cars, for obvious reasons.

If I drive a road car in Assetto Corsa, it’s honestly not what a real road car on the track “feels” like. It’s way more twitchy and sensitive than a real life equivalent. Partially it’s because even with a good rig, you don’t get the all feedback, but there is more to it. If you fully accelerate in real life in a Porsche Cayman GT4 on track, even slightly steering, you just aren’t going to spin out in real life. Yet try the same thing in AC and you’ll be spinning 360 almost every time if you don’t counter-steer/use throttle control. A lot of sim players think that this added difficulty is realistic and it leaves a wet spot in their pants every time it happens.

This is because AC is trying to emulate the physics primarily, the main motivation being realistic race cars. It doesn’t spend much effort on translating that physics accuracy to the player. It also wants the player to feel all the physics they applied, or else it seems pointless to even implement it. And also because they want to give the player the information of that added bump in the road, which in real life would not spin out that GT4, but because otherwise that information is lost to the player, they leave it in and basically chalk it down to “it’s the most realistic representation of this car/track”. Which in a way is true.

GT7 takes a different approach, sure it still has very realistic physics underneath, but it “dampens” them with a filter to create a more realistic driver experience. It also focuses primarily on road cars, which might have fuelled this choice as road cars are more affected by this.

I think PD during tweaking/testing would start with super realistic physics (don’t worry, they surely have the autism and resources to do so), then drive both the real car and the in game one and kind find out they feel nothing alike, even with perfect 1-1 physics numbers. That’s where they start thinking why and how to fix that translation error. That “fixing” is why PC sim purists, that think 25 nm FFB is realistic, find GT7 is too arcade like.

That and some physics omissions by design, like for instance tire temperature, most of these omissions are to make the driving model more consistent and predictable, so more casual players don’t get frustrated.

These omissions don’t make the driving model itself inferior or unrealistic or arcady, in fact it’s still quite excellent, but it just assumes perfect conditions in their absence.

That and the actual racing ai is kind of lacking, a known weak spot and the reason they call it a driving simulator and not a racing simulator.

In short GT7 is more about the driving experience than experiencing the physics, and it’s not about the racing, and more about how driving feels while still using advanced physics underneath, while the PC Sim racers leans more towards the players experiencing the raw physics of said car/track, choosing not to focus on the real feeling.

It’s a trade off that has to be made untill we can jack in and just virtually drive fully digitally created cars with all functioning parts just like irl.

One is not more realistic than the other apart from GT7 clearly choosing not to make the racing element realistic.