I think people who already have excellent situational awareness via their joystick hats take much longer to "get" the TrackIR experience.
I was using 2 hats (and a "shift key" to double-up the views) for *8 years* before I won the TrackIR I have - I would never have considered buying the thing since I was very happy and proficient with my views system.
But like I said, I got it for free, and gave it an honest try. I gave it about a month on the default software settings before disconnecting it and going back to the hats. I found I was still using the hats to easily locate cons that took me a few seconds of head-turning to locate with the TrackIR.
After another month passed, I tried it again, thinking about what I liked and didn't and made a whole new profile from scratch. This helped A LOT.
On this new profile, it took another solid two months before it became second nature. That it, it took a total of three agonizing and annoying months to break the 8-year-long habit of using the hats to look around.
It took about two months after that to de-program one of my two view hats to something else since I felt the trackIR was intuitive.
Now then. I think that to someone that never bothered mapping multiple hats for the perfect viewing system, the jump to TrackIR would take MUCH less time. And in fact, I think to a newbie who doesn't have any hat-viewing-reflexes, the jump would be almost instantaneous.
Having used the TrackIR since 2004, I really think it is a dramatic improvement over the hats - it just takes some muscle memory to make it feel intuitive. When you combine it with true 5.1 surround-sound headphones, the experience of having sounds smoothly orbit your head as you turn your head this way and that is sort of incredible.
Regarding views: I fly the Corsair most often, and I think that if you save your head positions properly, there isn't really a problem with rear views. I'll post some screenshots in a little bit.
-Llama
