Hee hee. You and I should just set up our own board to discuss this.
I have a MS FF Pro and it has the same setup as your stick.
I programmed the HATUP in my StickSet1 to the Forward_Up view. This means when I press the hat up I get the angled view, when I release it it goes back to the default view.
The downside is that when in external view or using full pan mode that the up on the hat doesn't work properly, and one has to resort to using the NumPad 8 key. Seeing as how when this goes out of Beta players won't be able to get external views on-line in fighters and probably not a lot of people fly with full pan, the point isn't terrible serious.
For what it's worth, Hitech is aware of it because I spoke to him about it. I don't know if there will be a fix or not.
BTW, I am glad to see that your are using the Shift key to toggle up views; I find it very useful and not a "work around".

Cheers,
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phaetnAT
Aces High Alpha Tester