Ok, so here's an example of what I'm talking about. I hacked the dev screenshot a bit to bump the contrast a bit on a couple of gauges. The airspeed indicator is tweaked to look the way it looks on my cheap LCD (where the gauges are much more readable.) It's possible that this is part of the problem, if the art is being done on an LCD that cost less than $500-$800, as they practically all chop off dark greys that give an artificial boost to contrast. The altimiter is tweaked a bit harder, and really shows how much more readability comes from strictly a contrast boost. There is no other tweaking or sharpening done - just moving dark greys down to black.
Another way to see this that I noticed is to take up a seafire. It has a couple of gauges with higher contrast, and they are actually very readable, whereas most of the instrument panel has these grey-backed gauges that are very hard to read.
And btw, I run the game at 1600x1200 on a top-o-the-line 21" Trinitron, so my resolution or monitor is not the problem.
But really, folks, the gauge backings in the screenshot are roughly the same shade of grey as the metal in the cockpit. I've been in a few WWII era cockpits, and the gauge backing has always been BLACK, not steel grey. And light reflection is handled fine even with the high-contrast gauges in the game, they still white out when the sun is reflecting, its just the static backing art that is unrealistic, and impairs readability.
