Will craft with VTOL-style thrusters work better in hover mode than ships made more like aircraft? For example, will the Cutlass handle better in hover mode than a Hornet?

So they certainly behave differently, although in that particular example, it's not great because the Cutlass has a bug at the moment. But what happens is that when you move a rotated thruster in IFCS, it completely rebalances all of the acceleration capability of that ship on the fly. And so if you, for example, rotate a thruster down, you lose all of the forward thrust that you would have had and it's now facing down. And so you can't strafe forward as quickly, but you can move up and down much more quickly. And that's the difference that you'll feel. I know a lot of the larger ships are balanced such that they really struggle to hold themselves up without rotating those thrusters down. But then again, the Hornet may have more difficulty because it's not got a thruster pointing down, but it's also much lighter, so it ends up balancing out a little bit. In the case of the Cutlass, it has an issue at the moment where that thrust capability is not being balanced correctly, and so it's not as nimble up and down as it should be. But the intention is that you get the same amount of thrust, but directed in different directions, which will naturally change the handling.