Other than the Vanduul Scythe, which is expensive for pure vanity reasons not balance ones, I'm pretty sure all the ships that costs more than 250 dollars are like, BIG ships. Capital ships and large, role specific things, not fighters.Yes. I played CStrike competitively and a few other FPS games. But twitch skill is all about practice (more so than MMOs). The muscle memory, coordination and perception has a lot to do with natural talent, but needs an immense amount of time to practice. The ability to see animations, predict behaviors and react accordingly within 100-300ms is what people sometimes deride as 'twitch', and it's something you have to train. So yeah, it's not an excuse.
I don't really know what kind of game SC will turn into, but I know that there's a lot of whales in it who probably suck and are in for a rude awakening when they find out that the $1000 ship they bought turns out to be underpowered and a $200 saitek hotas they got turns out to not be the most effective input device.
Whether I deliver the ass kicking or a 13 year old with a Dell-brand mouse and his fotm ship earned from ingame effort does is unimportant!
If gimbals stay the way they are currently, I'm willing to bet the best input methods will be joystick + mouse or joystick + trackIR. As much as the joystick complainers say mouse is OP for aiming, its still pretty mediocre for flying.