Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. These fancy input devices usually have LEDs, macros, variable sensitivity and other nifty features that are configured via vendor-specific driver applications. I've never used one that was even remotely good.
My Clevo laptop shipped with gamer-style bloatware that would take over a minute just to start up. I managed to reverse engineer it with wireshark and made a command line program that implements most of the features I cared about. The code is pretty short, here is the project in case anyone wants to see how it works or create a custom version for their own hardware:
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/ite-829x
It was just a matter of figuring out what data the manufacturer's application sends to the device and making my program do the same thing.