P3D is now marketed to the wide world of professional simulation and to the "academic" users like me.

This is a wide geographic spread of clients and you have a constantly changing and upgraded application that puts a lot of work onto the client to unistall and reinstall. I am sure you have arrangements with professional users but some work would still be needed by them at each upgrade.

With the rapidly expanding, exploding world ot cloud computing has any thought been given to setting up a full system on a major server system, complete with utilities and weather apps and the like, and turn our home computers into thin clients?

It would be one great way to go, and of course we would then pay, in my case happily, a monthly or annual fee for the service. It would save me a fortune on hardware upgrades - without flight sim I can do all my other computing on a very small system, probably just a connected laptop.

... because the web is so much faster and reliable and has much lower latencies than my dammed slow system bus...