Meh, some things are easier in the sim and some things are harder.
My dad has 1000's of hours and hundreds of carrier landings (flew the S2, A4, A3, A7 and F4) and he has goofed around with my sim quite a bit.
He says that tanking and formation flying (during the day and good weather) is way easier in real life than in DCS...mostly because of the lack of seat of the pants feel. When you can't feel the accelerations, it dumps you into PIO's real bad until you get your "sim" visual scan mastered.
But, in real life, you don't know what you don't know. For instance, interestingly, during my Dad's Westpac cruises in the late 70's they would often times tank A-3's off A-7's. The A-7 would do this weird thing to the A-3 when it got near the basket. because of airflow or jet wash off the A-7, the A-3 would yaw right exactly before the probe hit the basket. The trick was to just fly the probe like you were going to miss left and it would just snap into the basket at the last second.
So, my dad was teaching a FNG to tank off the A-7 and he refused to do it that way. He just decided to kick in some left rudder. Bad idea.....rolled the A-3 upside down....which the A-3 doesn't really like. He never heard the end of it. You just don't know what you don't know.