> he's most concerned about keeping the software simple, not making it actually work for real people.

You think your use case represents "real people"? Your problem is so niche it's not unreasonable for the developer to recommend you fork it and maintain your change as a fork for as long as you wish to use it. Real people don't fiddle with their touchpad settings to that extent. It's quite alright for you to prefer more complex solutions as well, but the vitriol towards libinput, a fantastic solution for 99.999% of users is undeserved.