Certainly. I rarely need to see the actual knob positions. The bigger point is that consistency is desirable, particularly when making adjustments on the fly.
I once read a book on website design called "Don't Make Me Think!" In short, when designing a business website (or most other kind of site), don't try to reinvent the wheel because that can cause confusion and users will leave if they can't quickly find what they want.
The Sadowsky pan choice isn't wrong, it isn't reinventing the wheel. But here's an example of something that does make me think: On basses with active EQ, treble is traditionally toward the neck and bass is toward the bridge, however a few bass manufacturers reverse this. That's from of a different view of consistency: the vast majority of "outboard" equalizers... and all spectrum graphs... and all pianos
... put bass left and treble right, but from a right-handed bass player's perspective looking down, neck (treble EQ) is left and bridge (bass EQ) is right on traditional actives.So reversal is logical. Somewhat: after decades of playing active basses my brain is wired to accept the traditional placement of onboard EQ. I never even thought that it might be considered "wrong" until 2 years ago when I got a bass with "reverse" EQ, and a friend told me "that's not a mistake, it's customary for this brand" and explained the reasoning. If that was my only bass then I'd quickly adjust, but I usually play Sadowsky, so whenever I play this bass I am forced to think about the reverse placement when I make EQ adjustments. OK, that's less true after 2 years, but the inconsistency with all other actives in my collection (and most other actives overall) still gives me OCD jitters.
TL;DR: Slow day here in quarantine.
Point is: personal preference; arguments on both sides are valid.
