There was a 1 year warranty on Berserker pre-orders (but not a lifetime warranty, there was/is "lifetime forge" membership, some day in the future we were looking at charging for individual runepacks and dropping the price of the hardware).
We don't have MTBF statistics on Microsoft joysticks to know how to price a lifetime warranty. It would be difficult to tell the difference between bad quality Microsoft joysticks and controllers banged on a coffee table from a bad match. I can't see a way to be sure we avoid losing money in offering a lifetime warranty on thumbsticks. Same goes for bumpers really, the next most common failure on controllers from my memory is worn out bumper tact switches needing replacement.
I don't have a good solution for bad Microsoft joysticks. The original Berserker modchip is a worse install than XBOX 360 Macro - it's a flex modchip install with many wires instead of a solderless like the XBOX 360 macro modchip. We do have a solderless modchip for Berserker coming shortly, it should make transplants less painful, but it doesn't help your case since you have the old flex modchip. The new solderless Berserker modchip will be a little better than the original XBOX 360 macro modchip, because we have put the USB jack and the LED driver board on flex ribbon connectors/cables (instead of hand soldered wires), and the XBOX One thumbsticks both sit on the "boomerang" board. Thumbstick replacement would entail disassembling the controller and removing the "boomerang" board and modchip but hopefully not soldering. When replacing the Boomerang board it still requires a whole controller as a donor (as we can't buy just boomerang board), but we should be able to save on labor and the standard thumbstick replacement cost down from the $100 price range which is what it normally takes us to do a thumbstick change or circuit board swap on an XBOX 360 macro.
We built a couple prototypes of Berserker solderless to test but have not done the production run yet, the assembly line is tied up doing contract PCB assembly jobs for the next two weeks, and then we will be doing a small production run of solderless Berserker.
The only option from a business standpoint to stay profitable but make it hurt less for customers when controllers wear out is to reduce the price of the hardware, and one way of reducing hardware price is to charge for the software. We could sell hardware at or below cost if we could generate a revenue stream from software sales. We would need to lock runes between user's account and their hardware ID and then have a way to do a transfer when hardware dies and is replaced with new hardware.
This is something we were planning on doing eventually but requires more $investment$ in the software to get it done: price drop on the hardware and some sort of mechanism to charge for the software instead.
