I also flew ships in fa/on, but then I took an arrow to the knee. It increasingly sounds like you can’t be bothered to use fa/off. Too difficult for hitscan?
Hitscan aim is certainly part of it, but by and large the advantages to negative acceleration is the major factor behind my preference for FA On.
If anything I find myself using FA Off less as time goes on.
I can’t think of a reason Not to use fa/off, except for when I need to lose speed quickly, so I use fa/on as handbrake.
A significant part of maneuvering is changing movement vector and losing speed quickly, faster than is mechanically possible with FA Off, is a huge boon to this.
Certainly there are disadvantages as well, but my control setup and piloting style make it easier to leverage the FA advantages and comparatively more work to aim fixed hitscan weapons without it.
Other than that, why fly with assistance, when pitching rate and some other maneuvers are so drastically faster without it?
About the only thing that is intrinsically faster FA off is positive acceleration (primarily forward and reverse) and that is far more subtle than the typical negative acceleration advantage of FA On (especially vertical and lateral).
The main benefit of FA off is how it decouples various limiters from movement vector and the movement vector itself from facing...all of which can increase ToT and can even improve aim with projectiles, but it does so by making one's vessel more drifty, which is almost never what I want (and when I do, I turn FA Off).