I've spent a bit of time working on vintage military & civil aircraft and it seems that cockpit ergonomics weren't particularly high on the list of design priorities. The aircraft in mind was the Beech Bonanza. It's been a while but I remember the switch views being obscured by the control wheel arm. Apparently even worse on the earlier models was the switch knob design not being standard coded (aerofoil shape for flaps, wheel shape for landing gear). No wonder there were so many gear collapse incidents.