It looks like it will be a pretty good tool for keeping basic IFR
proficiency.

Which it is.

I still don't have the joystick adjusted to where it is realist

And you never will. The sim is always a lot harder to fly than the
real airplane. The aero model can be tweaked for some level of realism
(meaning that the speeds/configurations/power settings you're used to
will work) but control respose will never be right. Force feedback
makes it better, but not good. Making it feel like the real airplane
is not actually impossible, but it's not something you're going to do
with the available resources.

Without the feel of the controls, scan discipline becomes dramatically
more important. You get tremendous tactile feedback through your
airplane's countrols - that's what getting used to the feel of the
airplane really means. Most people will tell you not to fly hard IFR
in an airplane until you've gotten the feel of it, and this is why.
Without that tactile feedback, you can never really tell if your
control application was of the proper magnitude for the deviation.

The lack of tactile feedback makes excellent trim essential; in
practice the trim on most sims is terrible. As a result, you are
always in a state of PIO.

For example, say you're 50 ft high. You apply just a bit of down
pressure. In the real airplane, you hold that pressure for a very long
time - because as you lose the 50 ft, your airspeed increases - which
of course causes the plane to see its trim speed by applying a nose-up
pressure to counter your nose-down pressue. In effect, as long as you
hold constant pressure, the rate of descent, after initially increasing
to the desired value, will decrease. This gives you lots of
opportunity to adjust (maybe remove entirely) the nose-down pressure.
On a sim, especially one with no (or inadequate force feedback, it
doesn't work that way. You apply pressure, and you establish a descent
rate. You think you have plenty of time to deal with this issue (based
on your real airplane experience - it's not even conscious) so you move
on to something else. By the time you come back, you're 50 ft low.
Thus the cardinal rule of sims - the less you do, the better. Shame it
doesn't work for the real airplane.

The true value of a sim is procedural. It's just like chair-flying,
only more realistic - and with the opportunity to be surprised. In
other words, it's of no particular value in practicing the physical
skills of flying, only the mental skills. Fortunately those are the
important ones. For that reason I don't recommend rudder pedals
(auto-coordinated turns are fine), fancy control yokes (joysticks are
fine), throttle quadrants or radio consoles (keyboard/screen is fine).
It's a waste of time to strive for realism, because the one place it
matters (the feel of the controls) it's effectively unattainable. The
sim is for practicing scan and navigation procedures.

Michael