The Connect API for X-plane is a great toy. I wrote a "recover from upset" script some years ago after having a discussion on the best methods for upset recovery by human pilots. You can easily implement something that does what a human would do and then compare other options that may be possible.

The one thing that does make it a bit "easy mode" is that all data is clean and exactly as you would expect mathematically. While real input data for avionics is more noisy and has several types of sensor errors.