Can't SDL2 be used with a joystick?
It can be used. Although, joystick support was not very well integrated into OSWindow because joystick events are not being sent into a specific window. Now I am doing a cleanup on the joystick support, by sending the event to all the windows. I will publish an example soon.
In SDL2 there are also two APIs for joysticks, the Joystick API and the GameController API (Joystick + layout mapping). I originally made the bindings only for the Joystick API. I just made the bindings for the GameController API, which is more useful, since you do not have to worry about different joystick layouts. There are also some events for detecting when a joystick is connected or disconnected from the machine which I am adding.