Actually, neither Thrustmaster's F-16 FLCS or F-22 Pro or their successor, Guillemot's HOTAS Cougar, nor CH Products' Fighterstick or Combatstick are "too big" - it's rather that Saitek's X36, X-45 and X-52, just as Logitech's sticks or Microsoft's Sidewinders, are kind of "too small":
The "real deal", the F-16's flight-stick - of which said Thrustmaster's high-end controllers are replicas, and after which CH Products' controllers are modelled (though not exactly copied), too -, has been designed that way on purpose:
- Usually, your hand rests on the plate at the base of these sticks, in which position you can easily access all buttons and coolie-hats except the two controls at the uppermost top of the stick: the POV-coolie and the thumb-button; this position is called the "low grip".
- To operate any of these two controls at the uppermost top of the stick - the POV-coolie and the thumb-button -, you are supposed to lift your hand a bit so that your thumb can reach these controls; this position is called the "high grip".
This is the way this stick has been
designed to be used in real life, and the USAF has spent a lot of time and money to develop this design.
Many high-end
flightsticks follow this design, but most low- and middle-class
joysticks don't: they are smaller than "serious" flightsticks, and hence you don't need to change your grip. If you're new to flight-simulations you might like it this way; if you're coming from full-sized replicas it can be irritating, to say the least - I for one find Saitek's HOTAS-sticks too small for my own taste. I can fully understand anyone who prefers smaller stick where you don't need to change grips - but to call full-sized replicas "too big" just proves a lack of info on the purpose of their design: they are not "too big", they only are meant to be used using two different "grips". If you don't like this concept, then this can be a valid point (for you, personally), but not understanding this concept cannot be a valid point, IMHO.
Anyway, back on topic: In our virtual life of playing flight-simulations on the computer, the coolie-hat on top of our sticks usually is pre-configured to act as POV-coolie so that we can look around. Since this is an essential function, the need to change into the "high grip" with "serious"
flightsticks (as opposed to the usual "arcade"
joysticks) quite often in fact can be annoying. Those who are using a head-tracker (be it hardware such as the TrackIR or software such as "Cam2Pan" to use a web-cam to control the view) don't have this issue, those who don't have one do.
However, no one forces anyone to really use the POV-coolie as POV-coolie: when Microsoft defined "hat 1" to be the POV-coolie, a single coolie-hat already was a luxury; today, all of the controllers mentioned above feature more than just a single coolie-hat, and their throttles usually feature further additional coolie-hats, too. All of the controllers mentioned above allow you to set up and use
any of the avaliable coolie-hats as POV-coolie (as long as it operates 8-way, or at least 4-way with corners, that is)! Personally, I, too, always preferred to use an 8-way coolie-hat on my throttle instead of on my stick as POV-coolie, since this way I don't have to change into the less comfortable "high grip" to start with, and I can use any of the stick's coolie-hats at the same time, while panning my view around.
