This initial calibration routine appears to be happening on top of what SDL provides by default, and in our case it is causing the triggers from the users joysticks to be sending values out of the expected range.

What we saw happening was that, during startup, the joystick is usually sitting on a desk, and its unfortunately very common for the triggers to be slightly pressed, since they are usually the resting point in the back of the joystick. With them pressed during the startup, the initial calibration is seeing this press as an offset, and causing the original axis range to be modified.

The solution here is to add an extra argument during the opening of the device, which allows the user to bypass this initial calibration and take care of it from its application. The bypass is false by default, so there's no API break.

I'm open for feedback on both the feature and the implementation itself :)