most of the controllers I saw on the market were lacking a decent bit of features

Yeah, I’ve screwed that up on a number of occasions before. Didn’t think about the fact that there’s actually a set of features that I do care about, get a gamepad, get it, and then discover that it doesn’t do everything I want. Wish that there was some checklist out there so that people at least think of them before buying, even if it’s not features that they care about. Something like:

• Wired mode of operation.

• Wireless mode

• Input latency. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve ever seen game controller companies rate and provide this, though several people have gone out and built measuring systems and then rated a variety of controllers. There is a surprising degree of variation in latency among gamepads. There’s also some variation for a given controller (especially for wireless), and the latency is large enough to be noticeable, especially for Bluetooth. Some discussion, and a database of measured latencies from someone doing so: https://gamepadla.com/

• Rumble motors. This is one of my big “I don’t think about it at purchase time and then get a gamepad that lacks a feature that I want” issues.

• Hall effect analog sticks. These avoid stick drift. I still don’t know what happened here, but twenty years ago, I had a Playstation 2 gamepad with analog sticks using regular old potentiometers that never saw drift. Today, a lot of the gamepads I do get, even when new, don’t reliably reach a perfect zero when my thumb is off them. It might be that that older gamepad had a larger hardware-imposed dead zone, and that newer gamepads don’t and expect one to deal with it at the PC level (which is obnoxious, IMHO), but it was enough to drive me bonkers. Hall effect analog sticks, unlike those with traditional potentiometers, don’t have stick drift, will reliably zero. They do cost more, but I personally am fed up enough with modern, potentiometer-based sticks not zeroing that I always want this.

• Hall effect buttons. I don’t see the point – button sensors don’t have any problem, in my experience – but some gamepads have these.

• Gyro

• RGB LED

• Battery life

• Weight

• Additional buttons that one can tie macros or whatever to.

• XBox-style face button layout vs Nintendo-style face button layout. If you don’t care about correct button labels, Steam will let one swap these in Steam Input, but I’ve run into a couple of games that don’t like Steam Input, and if you play games outside of Steam, that’s not available, will need to do up some other form of mapping.

• XBox-style vs Playstation-style analog/D-pad placement

• DualSense-style haptic feedback. From memory, PC video game support for this is very rare, but some people might care.

• Swappable, rather than built-in, batteries. Only an issue for wireless controllers. One reason I got a Logitech F710 some time back was because I wanted to have swappable AA batteries. Will add weight.

• Depth of analog trigger pull.

• Resistance of analog trigger pull. Some gamepads have rather more resistance, which can be fatiguing when playing driving games or something, where one is squeezing the trigger most of the time. I’ve never seen a manufacturer actually list resistance, unfortunately. This is particularly annoying because in the firearms world, listing trigger pull weight is a thing, so I know that people are able to do it…

• Force required to depress buttons. I have had gamepads that are fatiguing. As far as I can tell, gamepad manufacturers don’t normally list this (unlike keyboard manufacturers, where keyswitch manufacturers do a great job of providing a whole graph of pressure at various depression depths).

• Slightly clicky face buttons. This has become more popular recently, as best I can tell.

• Linux support. Not usually an issue, but I had a newly-released official XBox controller that had some kind of authentication thing that made it a pain to get working at one point.

• Linux Bluetooth support. This actually has, surprisingly-enough, been an issue for me with some official console joysticks. I think it was a DualSense gamepad that I had a ton of trouble with, probably non-standard stuff from Sony.

• Linux support for updating controller firmware. Not going to be an issue with no-name $15 controllers, since there won’t be updates. I have had to use an XBox to update controller firmware before, after I couldn’t convince Linux to do it, even with a passthrough USB Windows VM.

• Rounded D-pads. If you’ve ever used the original NES controller, you know that you can really start to hurt with rigid, squared-off edges. Most modern controllers are a lot more-comfortable than that.

• Headphones/headset jack. I don’t route my headphones through my gamepad, but if you use a gamepad in wireless mode a long way from the computer along with wired headphones, it might be very desireable.

• Can be disassembled. Some gamepads have all sorts of really weird security bits required. Probably doesn’t matter for most people, but of all electronic devices that I’ve personally pulled apart, gamepads have been the most-obnoxious; I have three entirely separate sets of screwdriver security bits that I’ve had to get at various points in time to pull apart gamepads.