Really, I am find with whatever is best. I just want to be able to make my Sidewinder 2 work without have to patch my kernel or wine. I don't mind setting a registry entry or environment variable.
I did have a look through @rbernon's commit https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/8686 and I believe it meets this criteria. I think it will guess wrong be by default on my device as it doesn't look like it exports an autocenter entry in sysfs, but it lets me set a registry entry to get around this.
One thing that I did wonder about is if it would be a good idea to have autocentering semantics (quirks?) specified in the udev device database given this is the usual spot for that sort of thing.