Some devs are so cheap it's grotesque bordering on delusional. Just splurge on the controller that's 100$ dollar more or maybe buy the lamp that's not from alibabas camping section, i promise you that's not what is going to tilt the budgets.
The xbox controller is already used by the military and other industrial environments exactly because of reliability - if you can't research your way to that info from just googling and instead want to "stock up on probably good-enough controllers, or have an extra one lying around (because there's lots of space in a sub??)" or "just be economical" or "i used the controller and it was good" - i'm happy you are not working with any software i would ever use, and for gods sake never anything mission critical.
Imagine being able to 100x the reliability of large parts of the one and only prototype you have, but instead you save 300 dollars of your 50 million dollar budget.