> You can't have physical buttons for all this stuff. It just doesn't scale.
Definitely. Like in the F-15 video, the controls near the elbows were rarely used (essentially "hiding" them out of sight). So may be a good compromise is pick 50 most used features, create buttons for those and then leave the rest of the 150 features in the menu system.
I haven't used a modern TV in over 10 years, I hope the remotes still have decent number of buttons.
[1] car appears to do everything right. [2] is worse because it feels like what you see is just the tip of the ice-berg. [3] had to be like that because there was nothing more to be done. It didn't need more controls.
Unrelated: A turn signal stalk is a brilliantly designed UI control. If famous designers we know - say Jony Ive - and if they don't know what a car is and you ask them to design a dashboard, not in a million chance that they would come up with a dangling stick behind the steering wheel that translates LEFT/RIGHT signal > DOWN/UP stalk movement > ANTI-CLOCKWISE/CLOCKWISE steering movement. It is totally genius and not obvious at all unless you've seen a steering wheel and a turn signal stalk before.
So originally, the UX wasn't UP/DOWN = RIGHT/LEFT (which btw is reversed on RHD cars). There was a V shaped set of contacts with an arm that pointed to the right or the left and was held there by magnets until you turned the steering wheel.
So it's more likely that someone worked out that mounting the switch on the steering column would save circuitry and expense than it was a UX/UI design decision.
That's the key though: almost everything in life except random websites is operated by users with various degree of training - either through frequency (TV remote) or explicit lessons (cars, planes). If you have to use a tool more than a few times, this minimalist trend is making the experience worse.
A quick look at the screenshots will give you an idea of the sheer number of settings. Can you fathom the sheer size, and awful daily usability, of a TV remote that would expose physical controls for all these settings?
Cars are becoming this way too. One example is ambient lighting customization in newer luxury cars.
You can't have physical buttons for all this stuff. It just doesn't scale.
Edit: I feel we were stuck for a decade in this worst-of-both-worlds situation where the number of features were exploding but could still be crammed into a 50-button TV remote or car dashboard [1]. Now that features have grown even beyond that, manufacturers are forced to move less-frequently used features into an alternate interaction mechanism. For cars, that's often a touchscreen; for TVs, that can be a remote that doubles as a pointer, allowing to control a TV like a mouse controls a computer. Thanks to that, my current car that I linked earlier [2] looks much closer to the very simple and usable car I drove as a teenager [3], both of which are IMO much more usable for an untrained user than [1]. This doesn't mean I think the Mercedes dashboard is bad; it's an AMG car, so targeted to enthusiasts who may appreciate having a physical button for traction control. But I don't think it would make sense to expose this button in an entry-level commuter car like mine.
[1] http://www.seriouswheels.com/mno/Mercedes-Benz-G-55-AMG-Dash...
[2] https://www.automotiveaddicts.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05...
[3] https://www.cars-data.com/pictures/peugeot/peugeot-205-cabri...