Get back in your box.

so tolerant
mod pls ban him

I tolerate you. If I couldn't tolerate you I would have left. :P

Up means up, goshdarn it. Even in a 3rd person game, I'm controlling me, not an ephemeral camera or pitch/yaw/roll.

I can understand some people (even though they're still wrong!) wanting up to mean down... but I REALLY don't get the inverted horizontal axis controls that some games offer. It was an engineering efficiency on early aircraft when the lever physically controlled the aileron/elevator/rudder directly via physical cables. Now it's just a convention. Don't try to pretend that it makes actual logical sense when disconnected from physical reality of connected cables.

For the former, think about the direction your head is moving when you look up.

As for the latter, inverted X makes sense if you think about it as moving the camera. If you want to look right in a third person game, you have to move the camera to the left.

Obviously I'm not trying to change your preferences, just explaining that there is some logic behind it.

It literally does make sense. The movement of the joystick is analogous to the plane itself. There's no reason they couldn't have connected the cables up the other way around, the convention exists because it makes sense.

Yes, I am. Looking up, my eyes are raising, my face is raising, or even my head is raising [slightly].

And to make this conversation worse: there are idiots out there (such as Apple UI designers) who have broken mouse wheel scrolling, making "wheel mouse up" scroll down. Because morons!

And that last but, yes, I know there's the connection with "touch screen controls", but I'm not using touch screen. And even when I'm using a track pad, "two finger scroll down" should go down, not up. I'm not moving the page, I'm moving the cursor/view port. I can understand when using an actual touch screen, panning on a touch display moving the "document" where moving your fingers up goes downwards, but only in that VERY narrow interpretation. All others up means up.

[And I already covered your "think as if moving camera". I'm not. I'm playing a game, trying for immersion. I'm moving "me" and "my view". Inverted controls like you list where right means left by way of camera breaks immersion.]

Inverted controls are skeuomorphic design, and skeuomorphic design is bad.

And your head is tilting backwards, like a big joystick. :P

Your eyes also roll backwards in order to look up.

Stick a model plane on the end of the joystick so that it's level and facing forwards when the joystick is neutral.
Now push the joystick forwards, where is the model plane's nose pointing now?
Pull the joystick backwards, where is the plane's nose pointing now?

No, it's just accounting for different ways that people's brains work, like being left or right handed. What seems immersive to you is immersion breaking to others. It's strange that you can't appreciate that...

WTF? You mount your mouse vertically on your wall? Otherwise how do you interpret "up" with a mouse on a horizontal plane? When I lift my mouse up it stops working.
There's no engineering efficiency either way. All you have to do to reverse the controls is cross the cables. Or if you use a rod for a rudder..instead of putting the control horn on the left, you put it on the right instead...or for an elevator on top instead of under. It make absolutely no engineering difference. They did it the way they did it because it felt natural when pivoting the craft around its axis. there's no pretending about it.

There's no difference between early and current aircraft. The vast majority of aircraft flying in the world still use cables and rods for control just like they always did.