Reicast not detecting Xbox 360 controller [partially solved]

[Mazterbaker]

System : Pi3
Retropie : Version 3.8
Controllers : Xbox 360 wireless + dongle (xboxdrv installed)

Hey guys, new member to the Retropie family here. Here's my story on trying to make reicast work. Hope this helps others!

Initially, the reicast emulator would simply not recognize my Xbox 360 wireless controllers. it would allow me to move left and right and that's it.

After some reading and lots of trial and errors, I got my controllers working by doing the following things :
1 - disabled emulationstation's automatic configuration of reicast (which did not work for me)

File modified : /opt/retropie/configs/all/autoconf.cfg

reicast_input = 0

2 - modified reicast's config so it attempts to "read" the proper joysticks from /dev/input
(my two xbox controllers appear as /dev/input/event6 and /dev/input/event7 once xboxdrv is loaded. Your numbers mary vary. hint : the command "evtest" will show your controllers with their numbers.)

file modified : ~/.reicast/emu.cfg
modification :

[input]
evdev_device_id_1 = 6
evdev_device_id_2 = 7

After a reboot, the controllers would work... partially. I could not play Crazy Taxi, the brake and gas would not work initially. I tracked the issue to the fact that the reicast emulator expects analog triggers events and not button events.

After experimenting, i found that this issue was caused by the xboxdrv parameter "--trigger-as-button". This tells the system to treat the triggers as button presses, and not as analog events.

3 - I did the following modification to fix the issue :
file modified : /etc/rc.local
modification :

remove all the "--trigger-as-button" entries (I had two since I have 2 controllers).

This made controller 1 work perfectly in reicast.....but However, THIS BREAKS OTHER EMULATORS (ex : Final burn alpha which expects triggers to behave like buttons. )

Any idea how I could fix that? I'm thinking about modifying the reicast startup script so that it kills and reloads xboxdrv without the "--trigger-as-button" entry, then revert this modification once the emulator closes. (I did a similar thing to get kodi to work, so I know the approach will work).

Any better solutions? Cheers!