LOL.. that's the spirit! I crashed and burned too, quite a bit over the weekend and I can't drink right now...so I don't even have that as an excuse till next month.I think all it needs to be "mostly" useful/better is a toggle to engage/disengage VTOL mode AND a toggle to control forward/reverse thrust. For landing anyway.
For strafing though I can't say.. I had too many beers by the time I got to that point and I crashed and burned.
It was glorious!
But I was able to figure out what I was doing wrong. If your ship is in hover mode, then it can still travel 30 m/s. That's a bit over 67 miles/hour for Americans. And it can do that in weird spinning motions if you're not expecting it, with the throttle set to ... what you might think is 0 m/s. I don't know if that was what affected you but it's certainly what caused me to crash into a few mountains till I figured it out.