Surprisingly, I'm in this industry since 1998 and know what I'm talking about. I have Sony 900F calibrated and nothing extraordinary in my sim as far as tweaks. We are talking about that lights in this sceneries are 5 times bigger than they are suppose to be in real life and mud "surface" that looks like 6 inch gravel runway
You are discussing two things:
- Bigger lights
- Runway textures with normals
About lights:
Then you should know that, on a PC monitor, things like lights and eye perception are impossible to represent as they are in real life, especially at nights, because of the limited resolution so, if we modeled a light with their real dimensions, it would disappear/become too dim way before it's supposed to and, of course, the whole point of runway lights is to be visible from far away so, obviously, since both cannot be had, it's more important to optimize for the distance, at the cost of not appearing realistic when close. We already do custom mip-maps, which is a way to reduce this problem, but they are not so controllable as we light, since they go in power of 2 sizes, so the distant ones are very low res anyway.
About runway normals:
Again, what you are keep resorting to "mud surface", it's just the effect of using normal mapping on runway textures, and they are far more visible when they are lit from a very low angle, like when dynamic lights are used We tuned them in a way that would look good both at day at night, and that can look good both on FSX and P3D (this scenery is still compatible with both) and without using any tweakers, which might change the effect on light rendering and increase the contrast. And, of course, the final effect also depends on the airplane used, and the position, number and strength of the airplane landing light.
The last variable, of course, is the user. As you said yourself, later sceneries from other developers are also using this method, and you don't like it as well. That's your own prerogative but please, stop saying this is a bug or something that must be fixed, because it has been intentionally made that way, and we are no longer alone using these techniques. We are usually the first, but eventually others catch up...
Of course, we sell everything with a free Trial version, if you don't like our style, you are always free NOT TO PURCHASE. Do all the other developers you were referring to that do these kind of runway textures offers a free Trial as well ?
