1. A mouse wheel knob manipulator plugin would be huge ( I don't need it so much myself because I can control most major functions through Go Flight and other hardware )

 

This is an oft-repeated request to the developers, that seem to be falling on deaf ears. Their reason is that it's confusing, prone to mixups with zooming, or that a workaround (click + scroll) has no real-world analog (http://developer.x-plane.com/2012/04/manipulators-and-the-scroll-wheel/)

 

I disagree on all counts. This isn't the real world, we don't have a copilot, we need ways to improve efficiency (without slipping into choosing frequencies from a popup menu). And click-dragging has got to be one of the least intuitive and inconsistent way to do knobs (on the default 747 3D cockpit, the amount of change a click-drag does, depends on angle of view!)

 

I proposed another workaround (click to "lock on" to knob, scroll, click again to "unlock") but this seems to be a blind spot that won't be addressed anytime soon. And if they finally do get around to it, they'll have delayed so long it may interfere with what 3rd-party developers may have done for their own planes.

have you tried XUIPC? http://www.tosi-online.de/XPUIPC/XPUIPC.html

Yes, I have I use it and the client feature to run Airhauler over my network.  It's nothing like FSUIPC that I can tell but there is a new version and I'm going to explore more.