Indeed. I think that’s the idea behind the MTL libraries used for online flying on IVAO/VATSIM.

Having aircrafts for exclusive AI use has a very good rationale. AI aircrafts have different requirements, namely they should minimize performance cost, and therefore have less visual detail, simplified flight model (i.e. as few wing parts as possible), no cockpit, etc.

the suffix will do I guess – thanks

This is the opposite of what I expected. Are you saying you have MANY planes for AI use but very few that YOU fly?
Our expectation was that many third party planes would not fly well under the AI, so the goal would be to restrict what the AI can pick to what is known to work.

There is no great way to do this right now. The least bad thing I can think of is to have the modified .acf files have a fake suffix like .acf.txt to throw X-Plane off.

I’ll do a request-for-comments once we ship to get feedback on further enhancements of the aircraft picker; I’ve gotten all sorts of requests, and we need to gather them all up before we do a revision.