Yeah, debugging anything that's realtime and math heavy is not viable. I usually have graphs, hitboxes and additional interfaces to help, together with pausing and frame by frame manual increments.
You can always make it control sexy first and add the bat jank second by tweaking the bat flight parameters and animation for realism without touching the camera and general control style. Doing it the other way around is unlikely to give a good result and you will be left with a prototype you can't even reuse. I wouldn't mind janky flight as long as it doesn't feel like I'm fighting with stiff controls.