Shanakin

I think there's a pretty damn clear line between changing control schemes, that offer no particular advantage whatsoever beyond personal preference, and altering the actual performance characteristics of the aircraft. Ultimately though the whole purity thing often comes down to, particularly so in this case, a rather minute difference in preferences and it seems like a pretty silly thing to mock people over.

Believe it or not, people can desire different control schemes without desiring a slippery slope of BVR missiles and and Mach 2 warthogs. It's not as if hold-activation changes what the aircraft is actually capable of in any capacity. Can a real pilot change their control schemes/Human-interaction-devices? No not really. If you care about precisely pretending to be a real pilot in a real whatever then that's fine and perfectly valid. It just means you have to deal with the control scheme as laid out or move on. Which I suspect is your point. If you're less beholden to that aspect, which the OP obviously is, which is also fine and perfectly valid, there are options open to them, because you know, this is actually a computer not a vintage plane and we can mess with it.

Some people gain enjoyment from precisely mimicking the cockpit interactions and procedures. As much, if not more so than the actual flying/employment of the systems. Some simply enjoy the challenges of flying and employing the systems effectively. Some in the second group would happily see the processes streamlined for convenience sake and get out of the way of flying things. The high fidelity flight models and detailed weapon systems providing the challenge instead. Anyway to answer the OP, you could probably make a fairly simple script that does this with autohotkey.

Having actually made an authotkey script that does Pylon back/forward it's actually really simple and fast. I also have a button that moves it to between Bombs/Rockets/Air-to-Air for quick changes but it's not really necessary. It's not too bad remembering the keys on the keyboard to do it (it is after all just the number line) but I don't have to take my hands off the HOTAS and it's all very smooth.

Throw a MiG-27(K) in that list for some ground pounding fun and extra BRRT.

To be honest I disagree somewhat. I found flying the plane a chore, and god help you if you don't have a full HOTAS. Then I made some autohotkey scripts and now I can fly it just as easily on a logitech Extreme 3D as my X52 pro and other systems. For me the extra controls just get in the way of actually using and employing the systems. Since then it's become one of my favourite and most flown modules. It's all well and good that the real plane has several actions to raise the landing gear and whatever else, but the differences in ergonomics and memorisation between a flip switch with 3 positions and being able to interact with it by hand instead of mouse, are already quite different and then having 3 separate keyboard commands when a toggle would be fine for many of them... doesn't really enhance the simulation or gameplay for me, it does just what you suggest it does - create more busywork. I have to agree with the original poster that the excessive separation of keybinds is rather annoying. Theoretically it should be beneficial for making a sim pit or the like - and certainly it made the autohotkey script a lot simpler because I don't need to care about what state things are in and just tell it to go directly to a position, but using them directly is a pain.