That patent is what I was referring to when I mentioned a novel approach.

Nintendo doesn’t hold a patent on the JoyCon joysticks. As far as I am aware they are an off the shelf component.

A company already makes hall effect joysticks that are JoyCon sized and they claim to hold a patent for them. I haven’t taken the time to verify, but even if they don’t have a leg to stand on they could still take Nintendo to court.

I find that the JoyCons work fine for most games, granted I have small hands. As for power adapters and carrying cases, I don’t carry an adapter and the case I use is very slim. Just enough to protect from drops really.

Using the larger, potentially more durable, joysticks would mean a larger potentially less portable Switch. Given that portability is the core feature of the Switch I can understand Nintendo’s reluctance to implement them. Especially when other companies are experiencing similar issues with their sticks. In my opinion a novel approach is the way to go here. Hall effect is nice, but it is costly and could potentially present some legal challenges at the moment.

I’ve encountered two noticeable issues while using these. The first is probably just shit tier QA, but the second could be that or a design flaw. I haven’t taken the time to tear one apart and reverse engineer it, so I can’t say for sure what the cause is. Anywho, about a third of my sticks will wig out and send complete garbage data when they are pushed to their maximum on one axis. Sometimes it is the X, sometimes it is the Y. Either way it makes the impossible to use and I actually did remove those and replace them. Of the remaining sticks a number of them will depress the under stick button if pushed all the way in one direction. It’s pretty easy to avoid this and it rarely matters so these ones I left alone and didn’t bother to count how many displayed the behavior.

They probably don’t want to use that particular design anyway. I’ve run into a good number of headaches with those joysticks. Not bad enough for me to pull them back out, but certainly enough to be annoying.