You get used to it with some practice. WC1 on the SNES was very fast, but somehow we all caught on back in the day.
I honestly never met a Wing Commander product I disliked until SNES WC1, which I quickly grew to hate, though I'm rather glad to be unique in that aspect... I wanted to like it going in, I really did!
The early reviews of the SNES version of WC2 were great. It sounds like a really awesome ground-up remake along the lines of WC3 for the 3DO.