You mean like the McLaren F1 road car in Shift2 that will go through Bruxelles on Spa at wide open throttle in 2nd...
Or the cars in Polyphony GT4 that get more understeer with a stiffer rear ARB, or the power-oversteering FWD cars.
Even higher end racing games have some questionable parts to them. Ever checked the track meshes in GTR2? Entry into the same Bruxelles bend in GTR2 is modelled very bumpy, so driving it in a higher end simulator shakes you to pieces and see's the car airborne... so GTR2 clearly wasn't THAT accurate, and had concessions for being a 'game'
Good consistent content can often be mistaken for quality in isolation. Consistency is a great feature of commercial products, but often the actual technical quality is a bit iffy.
I'll agree manufacturer input is great for the artistic development, but that seems to be where it can end. Ie, sounds, meshes, basic technical information.
Todays games look and sound brilliant. All part of having access to the information they need.
Shift 2 had the ability to have actual suspension geometries added for each car, but instead they just use generic types. That is a great shame considering they work so closely with the manufacturers. I've seen more detailed community projects!
So commercial stuff is looking better and sounding better, but the actual driving part hasn't really moved on with the new assets available. If anything we have seen a dumbing down of driving detail due to the console porting/sharing and the target demographic!
iRacing is perhaps the only really detailed professional industry development, but because it's all closed off data we can't even check to see HOW close it gets, or what short-cuts they have implemented... we can only trust it is accurate, or attempt to validate or invalidate what we get.
Going a bit off topic now... but the fundamental issue with professional developers is a profit margin for shareholders.
Technically, a community led game/sim with quality professional input over many years would far exceed what a commercial game ever could... getting there is the difficult bit
Things like rFactor 2 will *hopefully* be the catalyst to some great mods.
I will happily agree with you that a vast amount of community content is rather poor.
In any case, we will always get both. But I don't think the likes of GT5 or Forza4 and their future releases will give us what we really want.
Dave