Hope you are feeling better!
Mostly, enough to be back at work and coding

My problem is that the only JInput download is simple labeled "latest".
There are
nightly builds that have the build date on them. Hudons builds this every night.
It would be ideal to support unplugging and replugging controllers
Agreed, thats what the controller listeners were originally intended for.
Couldn't we just go out and find them all every time? Maybe have a new method for doing that?
We could, it's slow, and there are some clearup issues to resolve ,like people still having references to controllers from the last poll, those old controller/component objects do not always need clearing, we might have the same list, so then the old objects should work still. Thats my plan. Maybe I ought to get on and do this

JInput does hide this from the developer, but does so with a complex API that is hard to use.
Yup, it's not the simplest, but it is very flexible. The idea of JInput was always as a building block, not much more than a wrapper over the native layer. We could have had a JInput utils project that tried some other things.
I don't like some of the logging. At startup it dumps some stuff. When poll fails it dumps some stuff. Not sure if it is the JDK logging or System.out.
I recently did a couple of logging updates. Hopefully the logging is all done in JDK logging, which means it can at least be turned off

Man, java.net sucks. It is so slow!
I'm with you on this one!!!
Endolf