Ok, so I still encountered the problems from my last post where hci0 seems to be powered down, I reinstalled a fresh image onto the sd card, configured wifi and ssh, and installed xpadneo via the setup menu.
However even with the fresh install it now doesnt want to power on the bluetooth connector. I will leave it for today and try again tomorrow, could there be some configs or something that could carry over between installs? how can this bluetooth connector be so random.
Thank you for your help up until now though!