First time I tried it I wasn't impressed. Found out later I had the wrong settings for my FFB so had another go and have been stuck here ever since. Have to agree though, it can be a love hate, frustrating affair. It's the only sim I use nowadays.
rF2 embodies the whole topic of sim racing for me...i love it and i hate it...so it clicked immediately. Unpolished, but high fidelity. When it works, it really fires on all cylinders. When it doesn't work, it drives me crazy. It can be highly immersive and feel like sitting in an actual car, but also extremely off-putting and like dealing with an alpha version. AI can be absolutely life-like...or it can be absolutely annoying. Content can be absolutely astonishing. (Just the look, sound and feel of the new 488 GTE). Content can be absolutely awful. (no examples here, i don't want to make someone look bad...) The workshop infrastructure is curse and bless. It's extremely slow in use, but it keeps content up to date, as long as the content creator keeps on caring. Finally: Mods for rF2 are a topic, that i find extremely overrated. I know so much mod content for this sim, that is unfinished or just not really good. The most known pearls are a blast, but they're still the minority of stuff out there.
Definitely an acquired taste; bought it a few years ago, thought the gfx/vr was awful, the ffb was terrible etc etc. R3R killed its own ffb for me, saw some articles that suggested I'd setup rf2 'wrong' so tried again...now it's the only sim I really play, have all content, (bar karts) and has delivered some truly magical monents; 488GTE at Belgium 66 for example. It's also delivered some truly frustrating experiences; it's a moody game and sometimes gives you the impression it doesn't actually want you to play, it just wants to take up all of your disk space.
So you installed non-homologated, performance extending hardware in your 488? Well...at least, it's not hard to hit 80 mph with this car.... :-> Oh yes...each piece of content is doubled in amount of disk space due to the horrible rfcmp system. It's SO annoying and already brought some workshop objects to the unsubscribe by me, unfortunately.
A few years ago I bought it on sale, but It didnt catch me so stayed on PC2, but this december after watching a RF2 24H lemans race on youtube, I got so facinated in the RF2 version of Le mans, I had to buy it and other endurance contents too, and havent even once looked at PC2 afterwards. And will proberly not happen since PC3 almost turns into an arcade game. Miss the simple/working multiplayer stuff but rf2 is so much better on all other aspects.