All sims are not equal, even if they are of the same spec, manufacturer and owner airline. My employer has numerous Level D sims and they all behave differently, some more realistically than others. However, all make me feel quite drunk for the first hour, presumably because of the limits of the movement simulation and their apparent slight lack of synchronisation with the visuals and instruments. However, all of them have been much harder to fly by hand than the real aircraft , of which I have flown a few hundred individual airframes - even the oldest, most abused and twisted "Friday afternoon" airframe was easier to handle than the best sim. I have been told that several EU authorities insist on "destabilising" them to ensure that the checking guarantees we can fly the aircraft even on a bad day, but whether that is true or not I don't know.
Simulator cross-wind training is currently being undertaken at my employer - I did it on my last RST and they want to increase the cross-wind limits, so we did 35kts wet t/o and ldg. It wasn't especially difficult, but despite the sim's steady and smooth wind, which is in itself unrealistic, it was much harder than real life. We more experinced folk have all landed in very high x-winds where ATC have reported the lower winds (before the averaging systems appeared in towers to stop them cheating) because they were trying to keep things moving and thought they were helping us out. Those conditions, even with the gusts and bumps were far easier than the sim.
You have to learn somewhere, and these unrealistic simulations are better than nothing. I think my employer's restriction on new cadets being restricted to 15kts x-wind is pretty good, but instead of an arbitrary 500hr rule to derestrict them, they should have to do the sim training module and then be checked in real x-winds to be allowed to operate to the aircraft limits. I also think the current wet and dry limits on the 73 are too restrictive (not so the contaminated limits, though), but that's another issue...