New class skill / action groups in flight

[KerbMav]

So as of now - if nothing changed for 1.1 - scentists speed up data processing in labs and can clean out experiments, engineers learn different repair tricks each level and speed up resource drilling, pilots learn to point crafts at different markers on the navball.

Apart from pilots getting the short end of the stick - and my suggestion still stands to make them more able at reaching the requested alignment more efficiently with less swaying back and forth - they could be made more useful from the start (or level 1) by enabling them to set action groups after launch.
Either by EVAing next to the part and adding a right click option to it (set action group, followed my another popup window) or by enabling this option whenever a pilot is in the craft. I think both should be implemented to be able to "reprogram" unmanned probes and satellites - also making probes unable to do this, to make real pilots a bit more special.

[KerikBalm]

As I see it, currently there are no special perks for lvls 4 and 5 of any class, although at least engineers and scientists still get a rate boost to drilling/researching respectively.

Pilots:

Currently we have the ability to oritent the ships axis to point in various directions, but there is nothing to control the rotation along that axis. It would be great if we could have our pilots automatically hold the ship level to the surface of the body of the current SOI... ie, something to keep the wings level on kerbin. I think it would be useful to have buttons to control the roll/bank of the ship... hold 0 (level), 90 (top facing to the right as viewed from behind), hold 180 (upside down), hold 270 (top facing to the left, as viewed from behind. This at least gets us something for lvl 4. It would also be nice to have a "hold attitude" or "hold AoA" function... call that a lvl 5 skill

 

Engineers:

Action group editing in flight at lvl 4... this to me sound more like an engineers specialty than a pilot's specialty, but I'd have it behave like you suggest (with EVAing and part clicking involved)

lvl 5... ummmm ... maybe something like KAS... the ability to attach two parts... maybe just docking ports... like say "reenforce docking port connection" ... or reconnecting struts nodes... not placing new ones (although the "nubs" seem ot disappear from 1 part after detachment) so you could have a docking connection reenforced by struts (with struts/their nubs/nodes placed in the VAB), and after undock and redock, you could send an engineer out to reconnect the struts.

 

Scientists: When they changed the mobile lab, we lost an ability I liked, the boosted transmission. It seems it was planned that scientists would do this, but they don't: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Scientist

I propose at lvl4, scientists are able to process data in the lab and do a boosted transmission "the old way"

Lvl 5... ummm... can't really think of a new ability... maybe something with allowing a scientist to analyze a surface sample, and give you an even more accurate ore overlay? Or just more science stat boosts: currently 21x speed vs 17x speed is only a 23% increase over the previous level (keeping in mind that lvl 1 is a 500% increase over the previous lvl)... so to fight these "diminishing returns", a lvl 5 scientist would boost transmission by 100% instead of say 50% for lvl 4 when the option first becomes available.

This means that things that normally transmit at 50% (ie, temperature scan, atmospheric scans), would transmit at 100%, with no need to physically return the data to max out the science return (you would have to physically get the data to a science lab with a lvl 5 scientist though)... surface samples would transmit at 50% instead of 25%, Mat bays at 70% instead of 35%... etc

Obviosuly the transmission value would be capped at 50%, so that a crew report for example doesn't transmit at 200% instead of 100% for double science