It's different to use and quite exhilarating. There were lots of complaints about the pots in the old F22. People have always complained about pots in the F22, because let's face it, many people did have real problems with them. Ok, people like me took them apart, cleaned them out, and then they were fine. When I went to spend time with TM out in Montreal, they were looking at the three options available, namely pots, magnetic and optical devices.
Many people assume that optical devices are the way to go.
Apart from the fact that they're expensive, the main argument against using them, is that they have very poor resolution for use in a joystick. The ideal resolution for a pot is greater than your screen resolution. So if you had a cursor that is one pixel on your screen and you were using it as an aiming reticule in some space sim, you'd love to be able to move it up one pixel at a time. So if you are looking at a 1280 x 1024 screen, that's what you want as the resolution from your pots. Of course that's not what you get from today's controllers.