And you can easily tell where it's broken, when it breaks. "See those two pieces of cable? They're supposed to be a single piece."
I had a fun time putting the wingtips back on a KC-135 that was being prepared for display. The aileron controls are just cables, pulleys, and bell cranks that any farmer would find familiar from his own equipment. The rudder and yaw damper controls are ingenious -- the PCU summing and input levers are direct descendants of the piston valve gears on steam locomotives, whose dimensions and motions were laid out on graph paper according to a technique engineers today would find quaint yet elegantly satisfying.
I've also sat in Howard Hughes' seat on the Spruce Goose. The actual flight controls and instruments are dirt simple. But the pilot-facing panel of the central console is all detailed controls for the then-revolutionary hydraulic system.
Out at the old Wendover air force base there's the airplane from the movie Con Air. I love taking people out there for two reasons: it uses the same circuit breakers as the LM, so I can give them an object lesson in how they're vulnerable to damage when they're open; and the cockpit is largely gutted, so the cable runs are fully exposed. It boggles people's minds to see literal cables and pulleys connected to flight controls.
And on the B-17, on which I've also flown, the cable runs are overhead and fully exposed, at the two o'clock and ten o'clock positions as you face along the plane's long axis. That makes them easy to service, to be sure, but the waist gunners had to take care not to grab them for balance.
Don't knock the simple ways. The simple ways work best.