Since the very first build, a flap was a switch. Raise your wrists above your shoulders, bring them down fast enough, and click: the parrot got its whole kick in a single frame and the wings played a canned downstroke. It worked. Half a million people watched it work. But where your hands actually were never reached the bird. High, low, halfway, holding still up there like a hawk on a thermal? Same bird.
Now your hands are the wings.
Where you hold them is where the wings are. Hands above the shoulders, the wings go up and stay up. Hands down by your hips, the wings hold low. Hover in between and you glide. It's continuous, and the rig follows your hands with a small lag, so it looks like a bird and not a puppet.
How fast you bring them down is the power. A slow lower to glide is free. A quick downstroke pulls hard. Raising your arms costs nothing, so holding them high doesn't wear a kid out. And the kick is spread over the whole downstroke instead of landing in one frame. On the same recorded flapping, the bird climbs the same height, but its peak vertical speed is about half what it was. Same climb, no lurch.
A held wing is a brake. Hold your arms high or low and the bird bleeds speed, about a third more drag than a normal glide. It's the first time a body pose has slowed the bird down without diving, and it turns out to be exactly what a kid wants coming in to land.
The rules a parent would recognise. A twitch of the hands is a little power, but not a flap. A chop from wherever your arms first appeared isn't a flap either, because a flap goes up and then down. Arm circles are the propeller dash and never count as flapping. And the game never guesses your neutral position on its own: a wing held high is exactly the thing an automatic "recentre" would quietly erase, and I've been bitten by that once already.
How I know it's better. Not by watching it. Every flight writes a table: where the wings were, how fast the hands moved, how much power the bird got, frame by frame. A script reads the table and checks that each stroke gives the bird about what a flap used to give it, that the brake really bleeds speed, and that the bird's climb follows the hands with a delay of about a tenth of a second. If the numbers drift, the check fails before anyone films anything.
The old switch still exists, byte for byte, for the keyboard tests and for every flight recorded before this change. Only a real body gets the real wings. Which is right. The whole point of Sky Peck is that the body is the controller, and now the controller finally has wings.