Points taken. I guess my point of view is different coming from playing exclusively in arcades and small groups of friends long before personal stick ownership became popular; there was no "bring your own stick" and tweaking one stick to the preference of a single player was just unheard of in those days.
I still think there's value in not creating a dependency on a nonstandard setup, for times you're without your own stick or have to play at arcades. I'm not sure why that's somehow a mockable opinion.
Part of what you might not see is how the tweaking / DIY vibe is pretty strong with people who are building and customizing arcade sticks. I'm in this camp, and for me goofing with a stick is a fun thing to do in and of itself, personally I'm not really looking for better performance as much as I'm just finding cool ways to tinker with a stick. Gamewise I could just pick up a MadCatz TE and be fine with it, but what's the fun in that?
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
I get what you mean about standardization (I'd never swap to hitbox because I think it would annoy me at local gatherings) but folks are always going to enjoy customizing their sticks. Especially since sticks are more expensive and permanent than most controls. Not too many want to customize a $50 pad that they will use with one console. But for a $200 custom stick that they might use for several generations it makes more sense to make it your own in both looks and performance.
As an side note about tinkering I actually got into fighting games as a genre due to first building a custom stick, not the other way around. I do small bits of electronics work and woodworking and when I saw MarkMan's
old arcade stick thread it looked like a cool project to try. After building that first stick I got the bug for both working with arcade sticks and for the genres that they work with (Fighters, SHUMPs, stuff like that). The fun thing about working with sticks is that there is a broad range of stuff that you can do at all skill levels. Button swaps, stick swaps, changing artwork, adding multiconsole support, padhacking, building full sticks, lots of options there.