I always thought the switches and dials were mostly to impress the passengers!
I flew a Mil 17 with some East German crew recently in which I was unable to deduce what 80% of the dially things were. Fortunately they had a flight engineer who pranced around behind the pilot's seats and started the machine for us, because the cockpit was so wide that you couldn't reach all the knobs and switches from the front seats anyway, even if you could read the labels!
