Open Reality Joysick Device

So I'm starting to try and create my own devices... I want to start small and
maybe go large... so I thought I'd start with a joystick device to "Drive
some Objects" and then transition to something similar to the Old Monkey,
and maybe (Danger Delusions of Grandjour) make something where I can record a
move on a custom input device and then play it back for whatever reason... maybe
once I adjusted the curves originally created ??....

Anyway, before I get WAY ahead of myself... I was curious if I was off base, or
heading in the right direction, when I was using DIrect-X to write my Joystick
input routine for my device... to grab data from the joystick, or would it be
better / faster to address the hardware directly ? 

More so if anybody from Motionbuilder Dev Team, can chime in, how is the
Joystick Device that ships with MB written ? (Diect-X; Stand-Alone; Third
Party)

Q: Which brings me to "Why Aren't you using the Joystick drive that ships
with MB"
A: Because I want to do some things with the data / offsets parameters, that I
want to save / keep with the device, and other stuff I need to hard code, and
for the same reason 5DT doesn't use a generic Serial Driver, because they want
to do "Specific" things under the hood before passing the data o