Use the wheel to control the FOV in the cabin (for quick access to small controls), use the wheel to control zoom on the outside view
I agree there. While the wording is a bit confusing (what the mousewheel controlled so far in external view isn't actually zoom, it's the camera position... as mentioned before, zoom and FOV are pretty much the same thing in real life), I think switching it to FOV will lead to confusion.
While I apreciate the thought of keeping the controls consistent, there is the consideration of what you are most likely wanting to do in any given case. As such, controlling FOV in VC directly by mouswheel is great, because that's what you most likely want to do there: take a closer look at specific areas of the VC, without changing the camera position. But in external view, it is still much more likely that you want to controll the camera position, especially when using the "orbiting" camera with the vessel in the focus (I
never so far had the need of changing the FOV when in external view). And when in panel mode, it is still likely that what you need to do most is scaling the panel (I'm not even sure if the FOV does anything when in panel mode...?).
In the end, the functions are closely related. In all cases the wish is to make things larger or smaller, and depending on the context, different means of achieving that make more or less sense. In my opinion it would be more important for the controls to make intuitive sense (i.e. always use the most likely wanted means to achieve the goal depending on context) than absolute consitstency of functionality.