Ideal control set-up for retro/modern cabine

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Love the forum. Frequent reader, novice builder and 1st time poster, so go easy plz. I'm building a bartop cabinet. I want this to have interchangeable controls, so I plan on building a couple swappable panels. It will be PC based with emus and a Steam lib. I want it to be able to play the whole gamut, from arcade classics to most recent FPS with dual stick action. I want to do this without a 360 controller as much as possible. On my current build, I use a joystick + 8 buttons (typical fighter setup) for movement and a trackball for camera, but this isn't ideal.

I'm fascinated by the Final Fantasy Dissidia arcade release, dual sticks with four buttons each. It seems like this would be the closest thing to a 360 controller with arcade controls. I don't want to spend an arm and leg on two high end analog flight sticks though, so I was either settling for two 2-button switch based controls a la Paradise coupled with four addt buttons or trying to hack an old playstation analog dual stick controller.

Does anyone else have any other suggestions or experience? Attached is a pic of the unfinished cab (btw, the marquee has art as placeholder only; hats off to whoever designed it !)