With flying transport littlebirds in multiplayer lately I've been fighting with what seemed like incredibly sluggish controls in both the standard and advanced flight models. While part was due to my warthog needing the hall sensor calibration software from thrustmaster to correct it after rebuilding the articulation sphere but it wasn't the only issue I stumbled into. Basically ARMA 2 & 3 take the joystick sensitivity and divide it between ALL joysticks that are set to that axis, even if they are disconnected or disabled in game. So if you have used say 4 joysticks in arma, you now have your joystick at a quarter of the sensitivity. This is why using a mouse can seemingly out roll and pitch a joystick. Here is the post from a necroed arma 2 thread on the Bohemian forums Once you have all of the old joystick profiles removed you can then still tweak the sensitivity values to fine tune your joystick's performance. This page on the arma wiki is great for describing what each of the number blocks control. This blew my mind when I found it and explains the issues I'm seeing, especially since I have had more than 15 controllers used in the last 6 months with joystick testing.
Well, this helps me as well, ive used 5 with arma and never knew why I was always doing better lately with my mouse controls. Either way I suck, but still.