An interesting aside to "PD should make what people are willing to buy" is the fact that the vast majority of people haven't bought their games. Existing customers are the overwhelming minority; if wallets are all that matter,
you and I don't matter, relatively speaking.
What probably also goes underestimated is the proportion of people who really will "pay to win". It's not a matter of economic feasibility, because if a game's big enough (user-wise), it'll always be feasible to cram it with microtransactions - that's all most Facebook games are (with elaborate hooks to draw in
even just one transaction, which is all they want / plan for), and they're big business.
Portraying a certain image becomes more important at some point, namely around the time that you're trying to sell a supposed
quality product. At that point, you're not excluding microtransactions because they're not economically viable, but because they
look bad (or because you don't agree with the principle, or whatever). If a game sticks with them, not buying it (alone) sends no message, because if it's well marketed or compelling in any way, it will sell regardless of what the "elite" think of it, and you will just become one of the uncountable number of "people who don't buy games".
Weirdly, then, that annoying, pervasive gamer-elitism as the vocal minority is actually kind of useful in shaping the attitudes towards what is and isn't acceptable in games. Not that everyone will listen to everything, and you will always have little clades that draw their own truths from the masses of "data", but that's a much bigger story...
In summary, what you do with your money is borderline irrelevant, it's whether the "community" (in the broadest sense) can convince others of what to do with their money that matters.
And you must have missed the part where I said that adding all of those variables would be one the problems unless they've already done all the work to get the information that they would need to have to do it. This is the same game that has trouble getting simple things like gear ratios and rev limits and curb weights and even horsepower right despite all of that being "more-or-less public knowledge," so forgive me if I don't think it would be as simple as you are presenting it to add things like brake dimensions and strength and pad material behind the scenes.
And thanks for, you know, answering my query about whether the game already takes material into account.
It is simple, wouldn't take too much work and wouldn't affect the handling / tuning anything like (as adversely as) the recent update. The fact that data entry isn't PD's strong point has nothing to do with it, because that affects everything.
But I still wouldn't expect it, so maybe you needn't get so worked up about it?
I'm probably missing a broader argument here, I only considered your initial post in isolation, since you seemed to start ranting about brake fade out of nowhere.