This has been the thing going through my mind. As a newly minted person with a license to learn that really wants a Mooney.. And a career IT person who knows the life cycle of technology.... I learned on steam gauges and what is good about those are you can look at the position of a needle and not have to spend brain power to interpret what it means. For race cars they will often turn the gauges so all the needles point up. then as long as the all needles are up, you can just drive. as I transitioned to the G1000 you realize you have to interpret the tapes. also it is a little annoying for perfectionist trying to keep 65 knots as you may be inclined to chase the tape. The question I have is spend lots of money on fancy glass install or get a basic one to hook to the autopilot, then spend money on external devices that are much cheaper and easily upgraded? I am starting to read on my instrument stuff and feel like I could fly an approach based off my Samsung phone/avilution set up. coupled with ADS B via wifi I have pretty good internal and external situational awareness for under a $1000 There is a backup hand held GPS in the bag along with a hand held radio with nav capabilities. Which I learned was important to not rely on systems in the plane on one of my first solo cross countries, the com 2 circuit breaker kept popping taking out the com 2 radio and the GPS (later found out due to overloading by adding the GPS and not rebalancing the circuit load, then they upped the breaker size furthering my distrust of A&Ps) I continued the flight, because I had external redundancies. I guess the best thing it to know the systems available to you and fully integrate them into the overall execution.
