Much to my delight, USB gaming controllers became readily available online for peanuts. Thus I bought a NES and a SNES one to use with NES/SNES emulators.
Then an idea came - let's try using them with KSP. Both controllers are sadly incompatible with KSP when it comes to the joypad, but other keys work just fine and are mapped as joystickN key, where N is a single digit integer.
SNES controller is way more useful than the NES one for obvious reasons, so now I'm using that.
Best layout for me seems to be:
Kerbal EVA: Y (left), A (right), B (backward), X (forward), SELECT/START (jump)
vessel translation: Y (left), A (right), B (down), X (up), SELECT (translation/rotation), START (hold SAS), BOTTOM LEFT (forward), BOTTOM RIGHT (backward)
vessel rotation: Y-A (jaw), B-X (pitch), BOTTOM L/R (roll), SELECT (translation/rotation), START (hold SAS)
Controlling Kerbals' jetpacks is mostly useless because, for some reason, developers ignore adding locked view to Kerbals for years, even though Kerbals are also vessels.
One could use an additional NES/SNES controller for stuff like staging, aborting, too, or the same one, just be sure to map everything correctly.
I can say final rendezvous and docking are now much more interesting.