PC Controller losing connection intermittently

[Angelerator]

I've just started having this problem. I started using a controller when Endwalker released because of my poor wrists and it's been fine until like 2-3 weeks ago and I've just been gritting my teeth and bearing with using a keyboard when it just suddenly starts happening. Some days I can go hours and hours without it giving me any problems and sometimes it constantly freezes up every second. It's only FF14 so it's maddening. I've tried literally everything mentioned on the internet.

I've tried disabling any enumerators, disabling windows services for plug n play/etc, unplugging USB devices one by one, tried different controllers, updating my BIOS, updating my graphic drivers, tried different USB ports, tried only using USB 2.0 or 3.0 ports, since I have a ps3 controller I tried changing my drivers to a different program (which also lets me try various input methods), I've closed various programs to see if any were interfering, turned off USB power settings, I've disabled sleep mode for every single item in my device manager, ran every windows/file checker available for corruption, tried reinstalling my drivers with Driver Signature Enforcement disabled on boot, reinstalled the game with the "restore game data" option. I've literally formatted my harddrive and reinstalled windows 10 TWICE. If this doesn't prove that the game's controller functionality is dysfunctional, I don't know what will.

It's clear it's something to do with the device manager refreshing, but it only happens when FFXIV is open so I have no clue what we're supposed to do to fix this. I've even seen a few people mention this happens on console, which is crazy to me. I feel like this is an incredibly critical problem for the game to have yet it's been happing to people for years.


EDIT: I've not necessarily found a fix per se, but in my case it's a great workaround. Since the controller still works even when the device manager refreshes (by looking in Windows' game controller settings), I figured I'd just bind the controller inputs to keybinds. This normally would be a nightmare in an mmo but I just found out FFXIV lets you bind controller inputs to keys, which is under the "gamepad" section of the keybinds menu when you hit esc. So either use joy2key, xpadder, or in my case use controller configuration in steam for the non steam version of the launcher, and bind your controller inputs to unused keys on your keyboard. Using "directional pad" for the joysticks even lets you bind the L3/R3 buttons. The downside to this is that the joysticks are stiff and you dont get that rolling analog input, but this completely bypasses FFXIV getting any controller input and therefore completely ignores whether or not the device manager is refreshing. Also the upside of steam over something like joy2key is you wont be doing keyboard presses outside of the game. Just remember to disable the gamepad in FFXIV's settings to stop double input.
I believe you can bind keys to inputs with DS4windows but I can't confirm since it won't run on my pc. I can't believe I didnt do this before but then again I didn't know steam's controller settings were this robust.