The Black Shark beta is protected by Star Force, that's a fact. Whether ED changes their attitude about SF is to be seen. I've never had issues with SF but ED will be cutting it's throat with potential customers if they use it. My squadron has been discussing whether we'll buy upon release and we've decided that if there's a 1.13 patch for Flaming Cliffs we'll buy Black Shark. Black Shark won't be conducive to online gameplay with large amounts of people like FC is, you can only "datalink" 4 choppers at once. Again there's no dedicated server software, so if you wanna host a game you'll need a vid card in your host machine. That costs us extra every month on our dedicated server so we can run FC.
The other thing that has been bothering people in the community is the disdain for western customers by Eagle. Head over to Lockonfiles.com to see the excellent post by Colt45 on this issue. It's not just me or my squadron that sees this attitude. It's hard to spend money with a company that shows dislike for part of it's customer base. Even with all that being said I'll most likely buy Black Shark at some point. It may be months or a year later but if reviews are good then I'd be stupid to not purchase it. A year after release it will be a heck of a lot cheaper though. IMHO Eagle did the right thing in cutting all ties (and contractual agreements) with UBI. Anything UBI is counterproductive. When LOMAC was being produced, there were several western technical consultants helping out but Eagle almost completely ignored them. In fact, the A10 consultant bailed on them because they refused to believe the A10 or it's weapons acted the way he said they did IRL. Eagle also screwed themselves with help on the AH64 that they've been working on for a while. The western consultant that had offered help told them "kiss off" for various reasons that I don't need to delve in to. All I'll say it had to do with attitudes towards western customers.
All of this leads us back to the wait and see attitude of whether Eagle will support (and fix) serious issues with a product many of us purchased over 2 years ago. We've been being told that they'd patch FC at some point, now the official announcement says they'll be "evaluating" whether they'll patch or not. That sounds more no than yes to me. And since LOMAC/FC is how we're all getting our fast mover ya-ya's, we'd like to see them un-pork some of the missiles, fix some of the radars, chaff rejection, etc. I know they want to get Black Shark released, but since Eagle has ignored it's customer base for close to two years it makes sense to suck it up and patch FC. I know for a fact everyone in my squadron would buy right away if this occurred.