And I'd be a little ashamed to show you the back side of the tombstone that esp32 board is attached to.

Sigh, yea it does. This was just to get the i2c and serial connections up, so I could bootstrap the communications code.

That said: My brain never stops thinking about improvements and next steps, and I still had a few networking meetings.

Yes! Pretty much any gamepad that uses bluetooth should work.

I follow this approach. Code should be relatively self-documenting on what it does.

Why it does it that way, is what comments and commit log messages are for.