Posted for Epijk@aol.com:

Brent:

Although I never got this impression from you personally, I'm amazed at the energy you have for tilting at windmills.

The well-developed logic and reasoning presented in your post will likely have little or no effect on the hordes of graduates from the engineering school at Perpetual Motion University. But thanks for the work anyway (filed in my "Engineering Jewelry" directory).

BTW, is there a significant dearth of controversy in your life these days??  (...irrational desire and a willingness to lay aside logic and critical thinking. No wonder airplanes are traditionally identified as female since they stimulate those same, ancient neural pathways....)

I forgot to disagree with one of your points, to wit:

".......All this mental gymnastics  {steam gauge IFR environment the pilot takes abstract symbolic information (needles and numbers)} consumes a significant portion of your available brain power..."

Yes, but only in the beginning. When you get competent at IFR on the steam gauges, it becomes another "second nature" and doesn't consume nearly so much processor bandwidth, as evidenced by the intentional and manifest distractions with which the IFR applicant must deal competently on the checkride in order to gain the ticket. If you stay competent (not "current"), the whole EFIS issue becomes a solution in search of a problem.

I'm quite happy to trundle along with ILS/ VOR/ DME/ NDB equipment, and was very happy with that level of equipment during several hundred hours of "hard IFR" including 50 or so in a Glasair-3.  The gruesome, inconsistent
user-interfaces of the LORAN/GPS products I had the misfortune to encouter convinced me that, for my circumstances (Part-135), I'm quite content with the old stuff.

Jack Kane