360 Controller

[Atomic_Skull]

Surely there has to be a way.

Not if Xinput won't work with anything but the microsoft 360 controller driver. Certainly the lack of any third party Xinput compatible controllers points to this.

What if you could just modify the stock microsoft driver to treat triggers as buttons (now THAT is probably riddled with legal issues)

You'd need the source code for that because while it would be simple enough, it's not simple enough that you wouldn't need to write new code for it and compile a new dll.