Have you played flight games with a modern game pad? They play incredibly well with dual analog sticks. They're a lot more functional than a single flight stick in a lot of ways. Also Helicopters and similar vehicles are about a thousand times more enjoyable on a game pad.
It seems like you and Himeo both are missing something; all "flight games" are not the same.
In short, no. What you are proposing is not the flight sim that old X-Wing fans want. The first thing you get when you try to shoehorn a sim into an Xbox controller is a bad sim.
Not sure if serious, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Think of publishers as bankers that obsessively love to micromanage their debtors and only loan to game dev studios. That kind of relationship will never die. Since the dawn of civilization there have been creative people with no money and people with money who love what creative people have to offer and bankroll them (Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo... you get the idea).
Uh, Tie-Fighter and X-Wing needed like, 4 buttons, not a bajillion. A simple stick or gamepad would work fine....
You only needed a few buttons on the flight stick... but the game came with a keyboard overlay for all the shortcuts it had. Shift power between the laser types, the engines and shields. Hell you could change which part of your shield recharged faster. Then there were buttons for controlling the speed of the game, issuing commands to the squadron.. fuck I think you'd be hard pressed to push a letter/number/function key without it doing something in those games.
