hmm, I bought a ps33 saitek and it was only $40. I checked out the higher end one with the separate throttle control and found it to be rather HUGE to fly with , at least holding it in the store.
Even the ps33 stick is way too long. Unless you have monster hands, you could never fill the entire stick. Which makes it a bit difficult to use the hat and fire buttons. The joystick itself is a bit light which ads to the difficulty.
But the options are few and far between. It was the best one sitting on the shelf, and my experience has been to stay away from logitech joysticks per several friends and through the forums on here.
The lesser of two evils I'm afraid.
The PS33 has a nice button below the hat that allows you to do an upper view hat quickly with no need to use a mouse or ir tracker for viewing all around you.
It has a nice little flip up switch for primary fire by default, that you could easily map to bombs that keeps you from accidentally bombing.
I'm probably going to mod this stick and then it will be a great stick. I may rip it apart and shorten it, or mount it to my desk using a quick flip vice type of holder.
Of course, I have already taken a very small circle of sandpaper and super glued it to the center of the hat. I love mods and the minimum this thing needs (really all sticks) is a piece of sandpaper glued to the hat for sweaty situations!
Good luck in your venture. BTW the ps33 if I didn't mention is $40 new at bad buys.
