Oh, combat flight sims don't have any balance at all, at least, not if they're good and accurate simulators. They strive to make the simulator as accurate a representation of real-world flight performance as they can, on the full understanding that some planes are simply better than their historical opposition.
Combine that with sim pilots who have many times more hours than actual real-world pilots did, and almost all of it in combat, with zero real world consequence for death, and you have a situation where a superior pilot will be in a superior airplane and you, as a newb, are going to have to learn how to deal with it. And those pilots will fly the same "best" plane on every single map, and they've not only mastered it, they've mastered precisely how to fly it against whatever you're in, to exploit every weakness your plane has and turn it to their advantage.
It's tremendously fun, to be honest. Because eventually, if you stick with it, you do get better, and that feels cool. And you then become the grizzled veteran turning all those hours of practice to your own advantage, and the cycle repeats.
Elite is, by all accounts, exactly like this. There is a huge amount of nuance, there's the whole "build" aspect which is completely obviated in flight sims (where your plane is 100% capable from the get-go, every flight, no grinding required), and there's a much greater variety of options overall. After all, in Elite, the ships are not limited to historical loadouts, they can be whatever you want, within reason. It's far more diverse in every way.
If anything, competitive PVP in Elite is quite balanced, if only because everyone is basically flying one of a handful of different variations of FDL builds, and pilot skill is the real differentiator.
