As someone who does firmware for consumer electronics, I feel like having such ardent fans interview you years after the fact must be a great honor. Hopefully, someday I can be involved in something that's just as exciting to me and others.

As a side note on the Saturn analog stick section, there's actually an open source Gamecube controller project called PhobGCC,that's using a similar technique for the analog stick. I believe it uses hall-effect sensors to magnetically detect the stick position, with some fancy algorithmic filtering (Kalman filters, etc.)