Kali! I haven’t heard that name in a long time. I used it to play many hours of Warcraft 2 and Command & Conquer with friends - what a great enabling technology for its day.
It's a shame there's apparently no appetite for that sort of 6DOF game anymore. While the quality increase in graphics, etc, is dumbfounding I also feel games have silo into just a few formats/genres. In particular anything that strays out side of the WSAD paradigm seems doomed to be ignored.
Back when I was playing Descent one of the big tips was to set up key bindings that'd let you strafe in 3 dimensions at once. So instead of WSAD, I'd have Left/Right on Q/A, Forward/Back on W/S, Up/Down on E/D and Roll on R/F. This was a big advantage over the default layout, but was probably too weird for people to try and get used to.
I used the hat to switch weapons and such.
My friend used roughly the same idea with a trackball, which was probably even better.