[ubercow13]

It works great though, what's the alternative? It's visually small, so you can fit a lot of controls in a small space. You can glance at it and know the current setting and where it falls within the range of possible values. By making the mouse control modal when you click on a knob (so you start dragging and can drag over a much larger area than you could for say a slider, which isn't modal) you have immensely precise control over the value in realtime, while still being able to quickly make big changes. This is essential for performance. Combining this with some gentle mouse acceleration for the rate of change of the control when dragging gives you even more precise control. This isn't possible with a slider either.

I would say the opposite, it's basically the perfect interface for a very specific scenario with requirements that don't really occur in much other computer software.

[reactordev]

The alternative is the mouse wheel and keybinds. Flight Simulators got this right. Roll up on the wheel to increase the value, roll back on the wheel to decrease the value. Left click to push, right click to pop (or context menu, left click to push it again to turn off).

In fact, if it was all MIDI controlled, it's just a matter of mapping the mouse scroll wheel to a midi channel.

[ubercow13]

I don't really see how that would be precise enough, the mouse wheel has a DPI of like 10 vs 400-800 for a mouse. A mouse wheel has like 25 notches in a full rotation and even MIDI CC values go from 0-127, that's 5 full rotations, that doesn't sound practical as it would be far too slow. And many parameters require much more precise control than 127 steps.

I don't play flight sims but I imagine most flight surfaces require small adjustments and the effect of those adjustments on the aircraft is naturally smoothed out by the dynamics of the plane (you're adjusting an acceleration).

I imagine the scroll wheel is not suitable for dogfighting.

[yunwal]

Almost all DAWs I've used allow you to use the mouse wheel while clicking to increase/decrease the value on a knob.