There have been videos on YouTube showing that the thruster animations physically do not do what CIG are telling us they do (i.e. they point in the wrong directions). This may simply be animation glitches - but at the time at least - there was no evidence either way.
Well it's no wonder, because it's all smoke and mirrors. Think about it:
Normally you'd have fixed thrusters, and you have them for a good reason. You need much less momentum for angular rotation than for, say, straight ahead acceleration. So when SC came with the "articulated thruster" thing, my senses were tingling immediately.
And indeed, what happens is this: You give a certain control input. That input is fed into a very simple control loop that essentially ramps up forces applied to your ship over time. These forces are linear and at a constant angle. Now at the same time, the rendered thrusters are animated in a way that has them start thrusting AND start rotating towards the intended thrust angle at the same time.
There's your disconnect. Your thrusters are shown as "already thrusting" and "still rotating", while the forces exerted on the ship are applied at a fixed relative angle. To make up for this, they have to tweak the ramp up curves to make it even remotely usable. Imagine giving left lateral thrust, and your ship briefly being pushed down or ahead as the thrusters already fire while they're not in the correct position yet. It's plain silly and I get a headache everytime someone blabs about how amazingly detailed and complex this system is.
It's like they had a very complex idea and stopped thinking it through before they started coding. That, or the "thrusters should rotate" thing was just decided at a board meeting.
Now in comparison, I do have a few beefs with the thrusters on Elite ships as well (like, why are they sometimes still firing when I'm not touching the controls while in FA-off?) - but you know what, a little inconsistency is a small price to pay for the first space game with really great combat since Freespace 2.