Any way to make fishing less likely to cause repetitive strain or damage to hardware?

[Edyth]

I've been an avid gamer for 17 years and no game (except the infamous N64 Mario Party) ever gives me any issues of this nature besides this one, and it's with fishing.

Now, fishing skill ups, even at the lowest level, are less than one skill level per hour. Which means I'm in for 100+ hours of fishing. That excessive mashing makes me worried about my hands/wrists and my hardware, even if I were to do it in 200+ 30-minute sittings.

The options I know of for fishing are:
Keyboard, index finger and choice of middle/ring finger mashing the 4 and 6 keys. Worried about this unnatural repetitive strain for the hours upon hours required to skill up fishing.

Mashing the control stick left and right with thumb. Worried about damaging the controller doing that for dozens of hours. Also worried about repetitive strain because of the nonstop, repetitive flicking of a stick with my thumb.

Mashing the control stick left and right with index finger/thumb. Worried about damaging the controller doing that for dozens of hours. Also worried about repetitive strain because of the nonstop, repetitive flicking of a stick with just two fingers.

What I would like:
Is there any way to fish using buttons? I wanted to fishing using Square and X on my PS3 controller on PC. I thought I could just adjust gamepad settings in FFXI Config, leaving the game unplayable except for fishing with the gamepad (which would be fine), but it doesn't look possible. Any ideas?