Yes, steam gauges are safer than the tapes, and in the wake of the crashes to Asiana 214, Colgan 3407 and Turkish 1951, I suspect that more and more aviation safety-related people are coming to that same conclusion.
In the days of the X-15 aircraft, NASA did a study on tape displays versus round gauges. The study wasn't on which was "safer", but rather, which resulted in the more accurate flight path.
Not surprisingly, the round gauges were found to give the more accurate flight path. No doubt, some would say this was because the pilots involved had been trained on the round gauges.
Personally, I have no problems with the standard glass setup, but I guess it's what you're used to or, perhaps more accurately, what you cut your teeth on...
Wrong. Our brains work very differently when working with a needle moving around a round dial than they do with a tape. This is because, with the needle, provided we just want to make a quick assessment of the reading, it is a matter of just making a quick assessment of the ANGLE of the pointer.
Now it just so happens that humans are very, very good at working with angles. For whatever reason, evolution has made us highly proficient at recognising, estimating, assessing, remembering and repeating angles. It matters not whether you are an old pilot, a young pilot or a someone living in a cave.
When using the round dial to manage our airspeed throughout the approach to land, for example, we are predominantly just glancing at the angle of the pointer. We don't care what the exact reading of the airspeed is, we are just checking for the pointer angle to be "about right".
Consider what your brain is going through when using an analogue watch, as compared to an all-digital watch, for example. Let's say your lunch break is at 11:45 and you are hungry and are frequently checking the time on your watch.
With the digital watch, you must read the two minute digits and your brain must process them. And, the watch must be sufficiently close and the relative movement between your eyes and the watch must be minimal enough to allow the digits to be read.
With the analogue watch, however, you only need to glance at the angular position of the minute hand. The watch could be upside down, moving rapidly relative to the eyes or much more distant than the digital watch. In all cases, the analogue will rapidly give you an idea of how far from 11:45 the time is!
The brain has done a lot less work with the analogue than it had to do with the digital. To find the time on the digital, the eyes had first to be trained on the tiny space where the minute digits are, then the digits read and processed.
Under calm, low workload, low stress situations, this difference in workload is not noticeable. But in a high workload, high stress situation, with the brain close to saturation, the extra work demanded by the tape airspeed indicator can be too much for the brain. It will not even attempt to read the airspeed. There may as well be no airspeed indicator fitted to the aircraft at these times - the result is the same!
Just going back to those crashes I listed in my first paragraph. All of those aircraft stalled on final approach. All were glass cockpit types with a tape for airspeed. Stalling on final approach is a completely new way to crash an aircraft. In another thread, I invited participants to name a similar accident to a commercial airliner fitted with round dials.
Only one was identified (United 553, a 737-200 on approach to Chicago Midway on December 8, 1972), but that accident had a number of important differences to the three I have given (the main ones being that it was an unstable approach with the pilots apparently aware of the low/decaying airspeed).