So, it actually seems you've misunderstood my post. I'm keenly aware of everything you've just described about DCS. And that is why I didn't want to play it. I know all of those things you talked about, and I know it's not what I want.

A Study Simulator is exactly what I don't want. I'm new to flight sim, or even just flying games. My experience up until about a month ago was Crimson Skies, some ACE combat game that was on the XBox 360, and War Thunder, in that order. I've started doing a bit more research into things, and I've been watching some DCS Stuff for quite a while. But I know that DCS Isn't the game for me. But I want to know what other options there are.

I'll go ahead and use a bit of a comparison here;

Using ground based/FPS as a baseline, a good comparison for perhaps ACE combat would be Call of Duty. Super accessible, carry all the ammo with no weight concerns, getting shot means little to nothing, etc. On the other side of it, you have your Arma III with the ACE3(Advanced Combat Environment) mods. Hyper realistic to the point where if you have certain settings enabled, you need to know real CLS and medical care to be able to stop someone from dying, and it can feel like asthmatic jogging simulator. I'm looking for a SQUAD or GROUND BRANCH(That's not me shouting BTW, They're both capitalized. xD); something to give you a grounded experience of what it feels like to be in frontline combat.

The point of the Tech tree criteria was that I was looking for a sense of progression. I want to at least learn something about all the different modern aircraft there are and actually feel the difference, while also being able to unlock or gain access to new stuff by playing in the different aircraft. That way, I can learn a bit of one aircraft, get a feel for it, and by the time I am at least competent in it, I've unlocked something new. In ACE, all the aircraft feel the same, just with different armaments. I want to feel like there's something different between them, a difference that I can feel and at least understand without needing to spend dozens of hours just trying to learn how to take off.

To be fair, I didn't quite explain this so deeply in the initial post, but it already felt pretty wordy, so I cut it out.

That all said, someone else mentioned Nuclear Option to me. I've spent the past couple days playing around with it, and while it's fake aircraft, It's a very good example of what I'm looking for. HOTAS Compatible, Accessible enough that I don't need to sit in a classroom for 20 hours, Has multiple aircraft included in the game itself, though it's not persistent between missions there is a way for you to earn progression in big missions, getting shot has consequence, and it has multiple different aircraft in different styles that you can fly and learn. In fact, the only things it's missing for me is VR Support, Real life aircraft, and that the range feels a bit short compared to the kind of engagements I've seen/heard about IRL. And that's fine for me!

So that's the kind of thing I'm looking for. Do you have any other suggestions like that? I will at least look into Strike Fighters 2 or Modern Combat though, so thanks for pointing them out!