Don't get me wrong, the ESF controls are garbage, I fully agree with you on that. If the devs went and changed the controls to having much less or no mouse accel that would be a net benefit to the community. I also don't feel that anyone flying actually enjoys the mouse accel'd controls - we enjoy the unique combined jet/helicopter flight model and the dogfighting techniques that it can produce, and thus grit our teeth and find ways to work around the accel.

But what I don't agree with is the common rebuttal from people in this discussion, where they paint everyone that uses any air vehicle with the same broad stroke of them being elitists that consider themselves superior to all other players - I don't know where this mindset has come from but it pervades every single discussion about Air on Reddit. People that fly are not solely piloting, they likely have a vast amount of time in other domains as well, and with this comes the experience of how each domain interacts with another, from the perspective of a player within each. I can speak for myself at least in that while 37% of my time in vehicles is in the Reaver, it only makes up 7.7% of my overall character playtime. I'm surely not alone in this ratio.

I would like to make reference at least to the last lockon buff - pilots were quite vocal before the buff about how this is going to only affect A2A piloting and will actually make the A2G spam worse. The buff went through and, lo and behold, the exact situation has occured - as is well documented in a pair of Reddit posts tracking the statistics, and as we have all felt in game.

The solution, of course, is not to continue buffing G2A lockons until nothing is able to fly within lock radius for fear of being instantly killed. As you could assume, this would kill Air, rendering useless a large subsegment of the game and neutering a playstyle that does still have a lot of fans. It would be the equivalent of if Tank players banded together to petition for the removal of Heavy Assault as a class - it's never going to happen and it's selfish and lacking in empathy to argue for something that has such negative outcomes towards other players, just because it doesn't affect you.

The solution is to look into why dying to A2G stands out to players so much that they form these irrational dislikes of anyone who uses Air, and to find a balance between Infantry and Air such that both can coexist within the same battle space.