No. Everybody else managed. Approach it calmly and logically, and stop panicking. It all fits together. Once you have started to understand the internal logic of the sim's architecture, you'll be OK. Do as I said, open folders and see what is in each one, try and understand what it is, but don't change a thing. That is the only way to learn concretely what goes where and what does what.
If you open an aircraft's folder, for example, you'll find -
m3d - the visual model
xdp - defines the name which appears in the menu, cockpit viewpoints, gun types and triggers, damage and effects, weapons loads. Use notepad.
air and aircraft.cfg - define how the aircraft actually flies. Use notepad for all cfg files.
bdp - basically an offshoot of the xdp for easy access by the computer. Can be safely deleted and must be deleted if you change anything in the xdp.
dds - image files which provide the skin for the aircraft. Can be opened with dxt-bmp from Martin Wright Graphics, among others.
Sound folder - contains either a series of wav files for engine noise, and a sound.cfg file to define how these sounds are used, or a sound.cfg file that gives the alias path to another sound folder used by another aircraft. Important that this should lead somewhere valid, or the game won't load with this aircraft selected.
When you install a new aircraft, open the xdp and look for guns, weapons and pylons. Then go to the appropriate folders in CFS3/root and check inside each one that you do have them. If you do not, try here -
http://avhistory.org/communityserver/files/ - download and install the weapons pack. That may solve the problem.
Then check the sound alias. It MUST point to a valid set of sound files. Check how the stock Spitfires relate to one another. The C type has the sound files and the E type aliases to it.
It sounds complicated but in fact it's dead easy. So as I said, stop flapping, and just take the time to look at it logically.
