We wrote the panel.cfg manually with a text edit, because there are so few gauges, that it was very simple to made.
What makes the F/A-18 different than most planes around is that, since there's no 2D panel for it, all gauges that are mechanical in nature, like altimeter, fuel indicators, etc, basically everything except the glass MFDs and the radio stack, are not gauges to begin with: they are fully 3d animated parts of the VC which are controlled by the main C++ code of the panel. That's why they move so smoothly and don't have any jagged or pixelation effects.
And, there's no XML code inside, it's all pure C++, which explains why it has double the fps of similar (and with less complex avionics) products.
And, there are basically no 2D bitmaps inside the main gauge, because everything is in 3D and the glass gauges are GDi++, which explains why the .DLL it's so small, because it's just code, and it's dramatically optimized to be as tight as possible. There's no separate code for the 3 MFD and the HUD, it's just one generic program that can change its behaviour depending on where it's used, so there's no duplication of code whatsoever (C++ used as it should, with all the OOP techniques, it's vastly superior to XML in this area).