I still don't understand why you think that the requests I and some other people made would make it more difficult for casual players to set up their controls. As stated previously, you can still have a default controller configuration that is automatically applied to all aircraft, nobody has to setup anything and if you want to fly the 747 with a 10 dollar two button joystick you can do just that. BTW P3D (and presumably Xplane 11 too) also assign a standard configuration to every connected controller. And if you are happy with that you just leave it as it is. But if you want to change something to better reflect a specific aircraft you do that and then you can save your changes and create as many profiles as you want. Later when you change aircraft you just load your profile and off you go. This is way faster than activating and deactivating several controllers. At the moment I have seven controllers connected to my PC, and whenever I deactivate one the axis that I setup for it get lost and when I need it again later I have to reassign everything for this controller. In P3D I just select my aircraft and FSUIPC automatically applies the profile that I created for it. And even without FSUIPC I could save and load a profile for each aircraft.
Regarding your question if someone really assigns different buttons to the landing lights on different aircraft, when I still had my old generic Homecockpit I did that. I assigned the switches to the lights in the same order as in the real plane (which is different between a Cessna, a Beechcraft and a Piper for example) and had little interchangeable plaques I could place above the switches so I knew which one did what. Also, the same switch that lowered the spoilers in the Lancair Legacy lowered the Water rudder in the Realair ACA Scout float plane. And many other differences.
Long story short, before you invest development time in sophisticated automatic assignment algorithms or Virtual Cockpit 3D menus just let us save and load controller configurations. This should be achievable with minimum effort and would be a huge improvement already.
Cheers, Fabian