I use a rather old, very abused and somewhat broken CH Fighterstick. Back when all the buttons worked, I used the following setup (can't remember the button numbers, so I'll go by positions):
Trigger: Fire primary weapons
Top-left button: Fire secondary weapons
Bottom 'pinky finger' button: Afterburner (also used for mode switching on the stick, but I don't use that in FS2)
Right side button: Countermeasures
Left side 'thumb' hat switch: Forward/Backward = Thrusters, Left/Right = Roll. If I had slide available, I'd map those to this hat instead as it is the easiest to work with while also using other buttons.
Top-left hat switch: Targeting - Forward = Target in reticle, Left = Nearest hostile, Right = Nearest attacker, Backward = Subsystem in reticle
Lower-right hat switch: Misc. stuff - Forward = Transfer energy to guns, Left = Cycle primaries, Right = Cycle secondaries, Backward = Equalize shields (If glide is available, I'd switch equalize shields out for that)
Top-right hat switch: View controls (is actually an 8-direction hat, but the diagonals are hard to hit without hitting one of the cardinal directions so I avoid using them to prevent getting thrown into side view or something at a bad time. Now that half my hats are dead, I actually moved most of the top-right hat stuff here since I can live without view commands on my stick. Also occasionally mapped certain wingman orders here)
I still used my keyboard for selecting single/double missiles and some advanced targeting, as well as any communications I hadn't decided to put on the 8-directional hat switch. Nowadays, I use the stick for steering only and use the keyboard for almost everything else. It flies fine but even the buttons that still work are wonky and sometimes fail to register a click, so I'l playing it safe on important stuff like firing weapons and hitting the ABs
