Incidentally, if you don't like the mundane things, that's all the more reason
to fly a simulator, where you can skip all the boring stuff.

Actually it depends on what you consider to be "boring stuff". I
consider the entire act of flying in a sim to be boring, the reason
being that it cannot even qualify as a challenging video game. IMO,
the reason for flying in real life is that it is a challenge and
challenges are fun. It is a challenge not because flying is hard, (it
isn't any harder than flying a sim) but because there is a penalty,
sometimes severe and always very real, for almost every mistake you
make. In real life my pulse goes up every time I have to go around
with full flaps with trees looming at the end of the runway but on a
sim I can do the same even while sipping beer. The reason is that the
stakes are different and a sim can never simulate the most important
aspect of real life which is reality. Ironically this very fact also
makes a sim so valuable for certain aspects of training. But would I
swap my racing pulse for the safety and comfort of my simulator?
Never!
Have you ever seen trapeze artists perform without a safety net? It
costs more to watch them perform without safety nets. Why? Because
people pay more when the stakes are real. Similarly it costs more to
fly in real life than in a simulator because the stakes are real.

In real life, you can't avoid the boring parts and just keep the interesting
parts. You blow several hours of your time in boring activity for a few
minutes in the air, and it costs a fortune. That's not very cost-effective
compared to simulation.

Depends on what you mean by cost-effective. I would not trade my 100+
hrs in the air for anything. There is no question that sims are
amazing and can be used as training aids very effectively but they
cannot make me sweat or feel nervous or make my pulse race.. which is
why I don't take them seriously except to marvel at the progress
technology has made.