Thanks for the good visuals there, I totally get what you're saying here. Essentially there's a skid wheneever you take the turn. An object in motion stays in motion, so you slowly adjust your momentum in the new direction you're facing. I'm curious what happens when you do a 180 turn?
It sounds like changing sensitivity would have less of an influence on the always-present skidding. I don't think anything could necessarily be changed to fix that end of it. But I now think that the increase in speed with the same sensitivity ADDS to the skid effect, meaning the more your speed increases, the more the skid stacks naturally AND the more the arc itself also changes. So what you end up with is even worse than what I originally thought.
Pretending skid doesn't exist for a moment, Under-steering increases as the speed increases. Try taking a turn at 10 mph compared to 100 mph, and you'll notice that turning the wheel at the same time just won't cut it. This is because the arc is extended, as I mentioned before. So you need to begin turning sooner. If you turn at the same time as 10 mph, you'll need to over-steer to hit your mark (assuming you can't flip over), which is why I think increasing the sensitivity will do the trick; It preserves the relative timing of the turn.
Now lets talk about the skid involved. If you're going really fast and you turn, you'll continue that way. The faster you're going, the more that's increased. So not only does the arc change as a function of speed, but the skid is a natural constant in the game which also increases in itself.
I'm still inclined to say that if you fix the shape of the arc by creating more over-steer to compensate for the speed, it will fix the arc, but the skid will remain, which is where the learning curve has to come into play.
Either that or players will have to begin turning into their swoops like 3 seconds before they're going to hit the other player, and if everyone's swoop is constantly changing speeds and locations unpredictably, it will be a huge mess. I just don't see the traditional "swoop swarm" working unless some factors of swoop are controlled, such as the turning arc.
Maybe we should start talking about Flying Melee now.
As a side thought though, is it possible to add a function to swoop where if you hold the key down, you'll continue drifting, and when you let go of it, you'll immediately propel in the direction you're facing? This would completely eliminate the problem of turning and make it a matter of timing.
Maybe add this as a function to chain-swooping. Like if I'm flying forward and I hold shift+left, I'll immediately turn left and face in that direction and fly that way. If I just hit left, I'll fly left facing forward. Just a thought anyway.
EDIT
You can experiment yourself and let me know how it turns out. Just open the console and adjust the sensitivity in proportion to the speed, and see if it helps you connect your swoops. It'll suck because it'll change it for everything else too, so aiming will be harder, but try it out for awhile.