Thanks for offering another side of things, but I would like to disagree with you.
If you move it 1/5 deflection or 1/2 deflection, it's still moving. It's the movement that wears out pots. Scaling won't have any effect on the wear and tear of the stick itself. It's purely the software side of things.
If you're going to pull "back" on the stick, you can do either deflection in a split second. Having to pull back 50% or 75% to get the same deflection shouldn't change the fact that you can get that deflection as fast as the motor-neurons can travel to your arm muscles.
If your stick is placed in such a way that it is awkward to pull full deflection then I can start a whole 'nother thread on ergonomics and stick placement.
Might I offer an explanation for the events you noticed? A possible one?
You were working on a dying stick. You were still learning. You were at the point where you were noticing your skills improve, and you got a decent-quality stick to help that along. That doesn't mean that stick scaling itself had anything to do with it. It's secondary.
Many "top tier" pilots use x52s and x45s and CH gear. All of these are more expensive (and usually the more serious -- the eventually more skilled? -- pilots seem to use them) and more precise. They do not need stick scaling most of the time, generally because they are precise enough to get the accuracy needed without scaling.
The cheaper sticks need scaling to get the same accuracy. You trade movement arc for control of the crosshairs. So the reason a lot of the "top tier" pilots don't scale is because their specific gear is of a level high enough to not require it.
In my not-so-humble opinion (having worked with scaling my joystick in this game ever since AH1 left beta), scaling does not affect your skill. Scaling only allows you to get the most control you want out of your stick. Basically it lets you point the stick where you want. It's like a mouse, you see the cursor, you move the mouse, and you get precise control over where the cursor goes. If you've got a bad ball-mouse, it doesn't go where you want, often sticking, jumping, and doing bad things. That's the equivelant of if my stick were unscaled. You clean out the rollers and all of a sudden the mouse works much better! You move the mouse and the cursor goes pretty close to where you want it. That's my joystick
with scaling.
Now, getting an expensive optical mouse would be the equivelant of a CH or Saitek setup, you don't need to clean anything (read: no scaling), it just works.
To further the metaphor... If all you know how to do in photoshop is draw stickfigures, scaling doesn't matter. If you want to do something, scaling lets you do it. What you can do is up to your skills, but at least you can do what you see in your mind's eye.
If you've got an older stick (not Saitek X52 quality, not CH quality, etc) then chances are you NEED to scale it or it's nearly unplayable. If you move to better hardware later, you need to re-evaluate this scaling based on the new hardware, and adjust or disable the scaling then.
