I just spent some time practicing and on the advice of another DCS friend I experimented with different trim settings.
At a heavy loadout (say between 95% and 100% of gross weight), I found that setting trim to halfway between 0 and -1 works really well. My new takeoff procedure for this trim setting is:
Full aft stick before 80kts
There will be a slight nose up pitch as the nose gear fully extends, continue to hold full aft stick.
At the next nose up pitch moment, release the stick to neutral and the rotation is captured at roughly 10 degrees. Make small pitch corrections as needed and the aircraft should fly-off momentarily.
Apply nose down trim and/or stick to maintain 10 degrees of pitch as the jet accelerates to 350.
Probably still needs a little more testing and practice but I'm not over rotating and on the replays, my takeoffs look very similar to videos of the real thing. A look at the manual suggest -1 to -3 trim for takeoff. It also notes that for light weight configurations may cause you to have an aft CG and to take note to not over rotate. Given than, using less nose down trim for a heavy takeoff makes sense to me.
Trying -1 nose down trim works but isn't as error proof for me, but if you're stuck on flying by the book I think a little more practice and I can make that work. I did also try a 0 trim setting and easily over rotated. The nose just rotates way too fast and you need forward of center stick position (in the real world) to stop the over rotation.
