The latest VFR Scenery, particularly for Scotland, is fantastic
I used to use FS2000 during my PPL, to fly XC flights, so I had an idea of what ground features to expect. It was well worth having.
Today's (FSX, and that is already old) is much better.
I then used it for the IMCR, where it saved me £1000s. That was 10 years ago. But haven't used it since - for better or worse. Perhaps because the FAA IR and the JAA IR doesn't involve any IFR procedure knowledge that isn't covered in the IMCR.
Most instructors dislike "sim pilots" but there are so many prejudices in flight training one doesn't know where to start. They like clean-sheet students. They also don't like somebody doing a presentation on VFR flying abroad
That sort of thing will be thoroughly non-promoted at the school; they are afraid of their instructors' authority being undermined, they don't like the low billing density inherent in long trips and they don't like their shagged knackered clapped out planes going "tech" (one of the first euphemisms one learns in this game) in France or whatever.
One should never go flying unless one can do the flight on the ground first. This is obviously true for IFR but it's also true for VFR in the navigation sense. The sim has a place for that if you are teaching dead reckoning.