Airplane Piloting with Mouse Could Use Improvement

Anyone else try flying airplanes in Caldera with mouse and keyboard? It's a lot more difficult than I would have anticipated. I am tempted to load in with a controller, just to properly enjoy airplanes. But then when I'm no longer in the airplane, I can't just switch to mouse and key while on foot. Sucks.

First, what they did get right:

• Being able to enable advanced controls is great. I love this. Best of both worlds. I only use advanced controls while flying aircraft. You can do this on controller as well as mouse and key.

Some horrible issues that I've noticed:

• You have to keep moving the mouse in order to keep rolling, climbing, etc. Very annoying when you're trying to dogfight. Deadly if you are about to crash into the ground. On a controller, you'd simply keep that stick full tilt to continue your barrel roll or continue your loop etc. But with a mouse, you must keep moving your mouse, or else your plane goes straight. And, eventually, you must pick your mouse up and move to the other side of your mousepad. That's when your plane flies straight and into the ground.
• Keybindings. A player might try to resolve the first issue by binding pitch (nose up/ nose down) to your S key and W keys. Roll is bound to A and D keys by default, so why in the world would they neglect this feature? Very confusing to me. Honestly, rhythmically tapping W or S to get a regular and predictable pitch is so much more intuitive to me than moving my mouse.
• X/Y Sensitivity. I have to move my mouse across my mousepad, pick it up, move to the other side, so much. It makes me border-line hate aircraft in this game using this input method. You can independently adjust X/Y sensitivity elsewhere, but not specifically in an aircraft. This would also help a ton in obtaining maneuverability during dog fights.

I wonder why they did this, Nearly all aspects of the game appear to indicate that they take both inputs very seriously. But with aircraft, controller input is definitely the way to go in the game's current state. I just wish they had given the m+k input a bit more love. With some (seemingly) simple changes, I think they could have made it a ton better.

If you guys have any tips to help me (besides grabbing a controller) I'm all for it! Anyone successfully dogfighting with mouse and keyboard input out there?