Quote Originally Posted by Wildsprite View Post
no the position is preference. the whole reason the d-pad sucks is because of that large piece of plastic between the dpad and the rubber conductor. don't believe me go search for what's inside the xbox 360 controller and have a look at the d-pad assembly. the evil dpad makes a huge difference because it turns that lacking d-pad into 4 buttons making it more acurate.
For me, I feel that the Xbox poor dpad is due to its construction, rather than lack of separation. The best dpad I've ever used was the old SNES controller, and it wasn't separated like the Playstation.

The XBox uses this really cheap plastic, as opposed to a high quality plastic or rubber (preferred).