Nobody has talked about self-selection bias yet; most competitively-minded gamers will probably already have a good quality gaming mouse setup and a lot of practice with it in other games, while fewer people will own a good quality HOTAS or have years of muscle memory with it. Mouse input does have some measurable granular advantages, I think that's undeniable, but as many have stated it's by no means impossible to get good with a HOTAS, and using a HOTAS confers other advantages like unified analog positional thrust and the ability to toggle FA on and off without effectively losing rotational control. A decent number of the best players I've fought have used a stick, I'd say probably a higher number than should be expected proportional to the number of people who actually own one.
IMO a bigger issue is the default controls - Elite is a Zero G 6DOF game which, by default, pairs pitch with roll like aeroplanes and leaves yaw on its own less granular axis... despite roll not having a direct effect on yaw/vector as it would a plane. This risks adding "roll noise" to FA off aim without a deadzone, and pointlessly separates the two granular aim axes. If you're playing an FPS you wouldn't have strafe on mouse X and yaw on A and D. YMMV but it seems strange to see people claim "railguns are hard" when they're actively fighting their bindings all the while... even then people still manage to get plenty good enough with them to play competitively, railgun aim is more about timing than ToT anyway.
There's a lot of factors as to why people fly with whatever input they use.
Some people only fly mouse and keyboard because they literally can't afford a HOTAS set up that would be worth the switch (considering the reputation a cheap HOTAS can have for breaking) but already own a mouse and keyboard.
Some people fly with a HOTAS because they prefer the immersion it gives them.
Some people fly with a HOTAS because they always have for flight sims so they're already good at that.
Some people with a HOTAS spent the extra money because they enjoy flying that way, so they fly that way a lot, which makes them very good at what they do.
HOTAS has significant advantage for people that want to toggle between FAOff and FAOn which is an awful experience with relative mouse.
HOSAS has unsurpassed precision for directional thrust positioning with full analogue swing which, ironically, also makes it bad for aiming PAs using boost vectoring because the swing requires so much movement for very fast input changes.
Which is why I'm finding it really hard to wrap my head around the OPs blind statistic, pulled out of seemingly nowhere, that of the 200 best PvP players in the game only 10% aren't using KB&M with relative on.
My experience is a much greater number of PvPers are flying with a stick than that gives credit to. I wouldn't want to make a claim as to numbers without doing research. So i'm still waiting for Fuego to front up a source on that.
As far as I can tell the whole premise of the thread boils down to two assertions:
1. That KB&M with relative on is demonstrably so OP that everyone is using it - with no receipts for where these numbers come from.
2. That relative mouse has an additional stabilising effect - which has been debunked, because it does not apply any additional output from the mouse other than that which you directly give it. Strangely enough the opposite is the truth - it is relative mouse off which continues generating a mouse output after the user has stopped applying any themselves.
