The thing is that sim development is changing. Look at Kunos with Assetto Corsa, their office is located second story on the main straight at Vallelunga Circuit in Italy. They take almost every car in the game around the track themselves to both collect data, and to see how the car actually feels. Tbh I'm not sure how much of this sort of thing has been done with pCARS, but I just want to show how it has evolved into something different from being done the way gaming giants like Codemasters do things.
Good point, no doubt.
I am tempted to agree...but then I remember what happened in flight simming.
We had the Falcon series, we had the Flanker series. We had Jane's F-15, Jane's F/A-18 (what a great great great community we built), F16 Aggressor, Mig Alley (another great community and development team built), BoB and Oleg's IL-2. All prodigious study sims (perhaps BoB and IL2 not so much). Then the era of study sims was terminated by the usual excuse (costs and profits) and on came the multi-aircraft sims era (LO:MAC the most obvious).
I can't quite believe we're going in the direction of the study sims in regards to racing sims. By study sims I don't mean the kind of "study sims" we had back then in flight sims, but rather the dedication to detail for EACH car.
From experience, after modding dozens of cars and checking their data versus real life data, after talking to developers, it's at least to me most clear: there's simply no time nor inclination nor any kind of allowance (from publishers and dev studios) to pursue such levels of details (VERY HIGH) in current racing sims. Whatever the sim, all sorts of glaring errors (be them in algorithms or data calibrations) occur. I don't see that changing any time soon.
In the case of a really major development studio I visited last year, programmers/project managers/professional racing drivers take the cars to the track and perform extensive tests. Promising, it looks. But then...modelling starts, calibration data models are generated and...
...and to say the least, things "change". And not for the better.
As far as I know pCARS does not support open modding.
In my case: if modding isn't open, I will not be one to hex-edit it or reverse engineer it somehow. Period. I wish the core team of CARS the best, I wish CARS turns out to be one heck of a great sim but if it isn't I will not lose my sleep or much time over it.
Like you, I want realism (even if not at 100%). Anything short of that gets the boot. [Which reminds me, CL matches have started. Bye now.]