me personally im happy with a single 1080p screen and my trackir. 3 or more screens would be awesome, but nowhere within my budget. also, while it may give you a huge natural field of view in the horizontal, you still have a very narrow vertical view angle. you could pair it with the trackir but i think it would be too disorientating. i kinda wish instead that each monitor would have its own camera space, so that you can put the monitors in any position in real space and have them correspond to similar positions in simulated space. this would make it better for example if you had screens of various native resolutions. you could arrange them any way you see fit and you would just have to model the configuration in the table. would also solve the bezel management issues. doesnt sound very likely (any time in the near future) though.
it also seems to me that while game graphics have kind of stagnated in the past few years in terms of the speed at which they improve. monitor resolutions are going up. maybe we should consider the possibility that we need additional art sets for the hud (and interface) to accommodate less archaic resolutions. when you start picking up 1024x768 screens at garage sales for 5 bucks, its a sign that any screens at that native resolution is obsolete junk.
you could stretch the hud graphics, but you can only make them so big before you get ugly scaling artifacts. since the scaling difference between 640x480 (is that resolution even supported on modern operating systems?) and 1024x768 is 1.6x in the horizontal, which means we need something in the 1600 wide ballpark, and since many monitors above 1024 (aside from the 1280x1024 era that seemed to last forever) seem to be widescreen resolutions, i think a set in the 1680 x 1050 resolution would be a good point to create an image set for. it would scale up to other 16:9/10 resolutions pretty well. i wouldnt mind having a set in the 1080p standard, but that might be asking too much. pretty soon you would end up with art sets for every resolution.
i wouldnt mind the game being completely agnostic to the size of the images it would use on the hud. it would find the one that closest matches the required size and then scale it automatically. then make it so aspect ratio, not screen resolution, determines the layout data to use. images can always be scaled to whatever multiple of the aspect ratio is in use.
another thing i think we should consider is to not invalidate someone's hud tables if they are trying to make the game work with their video hardware. you can do this either by considering every possible screen resolution known to man, and include it in the tables (youd still get issues with people running multiple screens). something where hud layout by aspect ratio would come in handy. the other way to make an edit-friendly hud table for setting resolutions that the table distributed with the freespace upgrade doesnt include.