For me the argument has nothing to do with realism but rather what is most fun and provides the best sim result. I love gesture pitching. I don't like the meter pitching in the Show and Classic had grown stale. Gesture pitching is a mini-game on it's own. In no way will I pretend that performing a half circle when throwing a slider is more or less realistic. I don't care. I just found it a lot of fun to have a unique system for every pitch. Variety keeps it fresh and I do think this will hurt the Show's analog pitching system. 2K10 was still way too accurate and they didn't have a pitch accuracy slider to help fix this. It certainly hurt the realism and sim aspects of pitching when you rarely walk anyone and paint corners most of the time. That missing slider really hurt the game last year and I'm really hoping they add it to 2K11. I'll be annoyed if it's not.
The Show's system isn't
just up and down as you do have to tweak it left/right based on accuracy and the speed of the stick does influence it. It doesn't sound as much fun to me since it lacks 2k's variety although maybe I'll be wrong. Obviously some will like this approach better. I do think that the misses should be more random than what the tutorial video has shown. If I push too far to the right on the stick, the ball shouldn't miss right every time imo. 2K's will be more random and I think that is the better way.
A bigger complaint for the Show may be that you have to execute the pitch DURING the delivery. One reason I preferred Classic over Meter in the past was that I was able to watch the pitcher the entire time and see the result of the play. With meter I was so focused on hitting my marks that I missed a lot of that. The Show's new analog system has the same timing system and I wish they would let you execute the controls just before the pitch so you could actually watch it play out completely.
I have no problem with the Show going analog and have been asking for this to happen sooner than later. Great ideas should always be borrowed so we can all benefit. These two systems will be compared at release and I'll enjoy reading the various comments on them once we can actually use them. The biggest benefit of analog controls is in the pitching for me so this is something I'm really going to try out for both games. Let's hope the demos come out before release this year.