Elite has been that way for 33 years. Changing the way one enters stations likely would have pissed off a good many gamers.
Not as many, I suspect, as have rage-quit or never bought it in the first place after trying it. NOTHING else in the game is as hard as the single skill you have to do the most. I’m literally an explorer because I don’t have to go through the pain of docking very often that way. (and it’s extra painful in VR, since the invitable collisions with the toaster grill hurl the ship around wildly in all directions – you pretty much have to take the headset off to keep from throwing up).
“We’re remaining faithful to a UI decision that everybody agreed sucked in the 80’s” isn’t much of an argument for keeping it. Seriously, read the forums – the horrific landing crap probably makes up 25% of all “how do I play” messages, and has since release. It’s game design 101 that you don’t make beginning players perform the most difficult actions first. Heck, just having every ship come with a simple docking computer would probably get rid of most of the complaints (and the purists could disable, ignore, or remove it), but in three years they haven’t even done that.
Well, sort of.
In the original, you just hit the slot (and there was an easy cheat virtually everyone used - I never successfully docked on the cpc version)
In the elite Frontier game, everyone had auto dock.
Giving the starting sidewinder an auto dock is not actually a bad idea. It won’t happen though, because the worst of the old guys complaining about their immersion are on the dev team.
I played the hell out of the original version on the Commodore, Elite+ in MS-DOS, and the Elite+ open-source remake in Windows; this is the first I’ve heard of any “easy cheat”.
Elite: Dangerous actually made it easier to enter the slot by widening; stay on the green side and you’re good to go. No real worry about running into an exiting ship unless there’s a Beluga trying to pass at the same time. 
That’s funny. My coordination is shit but I can dock with no problem, unless I’m commanding a Beluga. Never had any real problems passing through the slot until that thing with its huge ass.
On my Amstrad CPC version, you could simply save the game. Reloading would bring you back docked in the system you were in. It was barely even a cheat.
Oh, “save scumming”. I thought you meant a cheat to make docking easier.
Never needed that for docking unless the AI decided to send out a ship at the same time I was trying to enter.
No, it’s not quite save scumming. You jump into the system, get to the station, and then, when you’re outside the station, you save the game. WHen you reload, you’re docked in the station.
Wait, the CPC would load you inside the nearest station? Must’ve changed that for later versions. The ones I played loaded the last station visited, if one remembered to save the game there.
Simulpost. 
Yes, it would load the station of the system you were in. I don’t know how widespread this one - the CPC version was the only version I played.
Anyway, the upshot of it all is that manual docking isn’t actually a staple of the series - every ship in Elite: Frontier not only had docking computers, but also an autopilot. First Encounters worked the same way.
I have Frontier but never really got interested in playing. If I weren’t playing Dangerous, I’d be still running missions, trading, and collecting bounties in Oolite. I’d wager the majority of people who had played any sort of Elite previously came directly from Oolite without playing any other versions recently.
Oolite isn’t, when you get right down to it, Elite, and so the majority of people who apparently came to Elite from it (and I’d dispute that - I’d never heard of it until mentioned here) couldn’t reasonably expect everything to be the same. Especially since lots of other things are very, very different.
Not Dangeorus, no, but it is Elite+ with modding capability that can run on modern computers and has been around for 13 years with the most recent patch being a year ago.
Here’s where I first heard about it and here’s a thread I started when I really got into the game. ETA: the latest version is capable of loading mods from within the game so the links in the thread I started are longer needed.
I’m not arguing that it hasn’t been around, but that it’s not necessarily the “upgrade path” that everyone will necessarily have come along to get to Elite Dangerous. An awful lot of people on the forums and reddit mention playing the original Elite and Elite Frontier (both of which were available to download from the Elite Club website before Elite Dangerous launched).
All of this is really beside the point, though, which is that docking in Elite Dangerous could have been removed entirely ( an auto-docking computer in every ship, like in the last 2 iterations of actual Elite) and nobody would have moaned.
I have Elite: Dangerous on Xbox One. I’ve had it for a long time (barely played it though). I have mixed feelings about docking. I do feel like it does add to the immersion of the game, and makes it feel more like a realistic flight simulator than a simple shoot-em-up FPS. But it’s so stressful it’s the main reason I don’t go back to play it. Seriously, it’s such a pain I get a bit of PTS every time I think about launching the game.
Re-reading this thread makes me want to pick it back up. If I do, one of the first things I’ll invest in is a docking computer.
So, there are no directional thrusters for forward and backward, is that correct? I got myself in docking position and put it on the ground but couldn’t stop the engine fast enough and then went into reverse and messed up. Seriously it is a PITA
All forward thrust is by those big things on the back of your ship.
I find the easiest thing to do is zero the throttle and drop landing gear upon entering the station then use analog throttle control to fine-tune the approach.
Well yeah. But main engines don’t offer the fine touch that thrusters do.
That’s what analog throttle control is for.
Mine is bound to forward & back on my right stick (left & right is roll) with digital throttle control bound to the triggers.