Asobo said otherwise in their Q&As. Go ahead and watch them, they’re embedded in my post. They specifically said that these improvements were “on the way” on March 2nd, and then on April 27th they said that they were now implemented (SU9 was released on Apr 26th), and then they said that SU10 will include the visualizations since they correctly predicted that the casual gamers would be very confused by the new forces acting on their plane.
Doesn’t apply at the equator, which is where I do most of my testing of the system. These are obviously recent improvements. The old system wasn’t nearly as fleshed out and couldn’t be used for soaring I believe. It just seemed to move your plane somewhat randomly. That was completely different than what we have now.