[apalrd]

-Drivers did not complain. I personally loved it, and I drove a Halo style drive in 2012. High speed driving performance is WAY better than with a tank setup, and alighment is easier by optimizing it when the quick turn button is pressed.
--Driving with a steering wheel is not uncommon, we tried to emulate it with this, as we believe it is a superior HMI to a two-stick tank drive.

-Purely subjective driver analysis has shown that it's MUCH easier/faster to master the graceful high speed arc maneuvers we want with a culver or cheesy drive than the two-stick tank. We actually have a lot of code in our 2011 robot (two stick tank) to modify the inner wheels to arc nicely when the driver lets go of one stick to turn, but that code was quite a bit of work to develop fully and not a good solution, since it really makes driving three-state (both sticks same direction, one stick full one stick zero, both sticks opposite direction) and the driver bumps it on and off a lot for jerky turns.

-Judges loved it, noted 'Culver Drive' in championship award speech

-We used a Halo drive with a slide drive in Vex (what 148 in 2010 had, except without the droppable traction wheels and bump crossing ability), we just used the left stick for translation and right stick for rotation. Since the left/right wheels control steering, we simply ran a normal Halo drive and mapped the slide wheel to left X (left Y was throttle for left/right wheels, right X was wheel). This ran three Vex robots and all drivers loved it for that drivetrain, one was able to pick up some 'fancy' moves like circling around a point in front of him or spinning around off a defender extremely quickly. For a mecanum, I would find theta/R of both sticks, and use left theta for translation angle, left R for throttle, and right stick would determine the rotation as it does now. Then you would just have to solve the mecanum math and warp everything back into the +-1 range nicely.