I don't want to see this go the path of Project Cars....
Leave the arcade controller stuff to other games I say. Don't get me wrong, I like to use a controller sometimes because it's just easier lounge/couch potato style, but leave it to those games. Start tailoring things for controller inputs and we have another Forza/GT in a few iterations.
Edit: Now in saying this no harm in having game features like licencing and buying cars I say to make it less of a typical sim. I welcome those additions. That doesn't detract from the simulation part of the game
Controller support and great physics are not mutually exclusive. Project Cars didn't go the way it did with PC3 because of controller support, it was a deliberate game design choice to make it more Need for Speed Shift than Project Cars 1 and 2.
It's pretty strightforward to have well calibrated input smoothing etc. when a controller is detected to make playing on a controller accessible and a decent experience.
In fact, it is very possible to set up a controller to work fairly well with Assetto Corsa and even more so to set it up to work well in Assetto Corsa Competizione. The problem was, people had to know what they were doing and mess around with game files. None of that impacted the games physics, it just made playing on a controller better.
So my questions to you are, why does having decent controller support and configs make a game arcade? And, if good controller support can be implemented as standard, please explain in a logical manner, why should they not do it? It only makes the game better and more accessible to more people to have good controller support.
We need less peripheral snobbery and more logical thought about these things. Why not make Microsoft Flight Sim completley useless to play with a keyboard and mouse? In fact, we should make every simulation only playable with a peripheral designed to mimic the controls being simulated in that exact games scenario.
We don't do that because it's a dumb idea to deliberately lock a decent experience behind expensive peripherals. There's nothing lose, absolutely nothing lost, by making controller support better optomised.
To dumb down the physics and take an approach where the physics themselves are more accessible, would be a completley different design choice that would have nothing to do with making the game play well on a controller, though that's not to say the two can't happen together, but they are seperate issues.
