Swerve advice

[Mpengelly]

Our team built a swerve drive robot this year and although it works well on the practice field, under the stress of competition, our driver seems to struggle significantly. We have our second regional this weekend and we are in the midst of trying to figure out what we can best do to solve this problem. So to those teams that have lots of experience with swerve, I have a few questions:

Firstly, what joystick or controller is most commonly used to control swerve. Our team has an X-52 (http://www.saitek.com/uk/prod/x52pro.html) which has 3 axises and seems like it would be the perfect for swerve or Mecanum. For some reason our main driver elected to use a gamepad having throttle on one joystick and direction on the other. It seems to me that using X-52 with throttle being magnitude and direction being angle on x,y would make the most sense and then use z to rotate. I'm not a programmer or primary driver but I'm trying to figure out what might help simplify and improve our controls/driving. The reason I would hold back suggesting it to the team is that changing the drive system going into a regional doesn't seem like a recipe for success either. Thoughts?

Secondly, it's been proposed on the team that we could change the front two traction wheels to double omni's and drive tank because our driver has a ton of experience with it. While it seems criminal to not use swerve, it might serve us better and I was wondering what people thought. Another question would be if it would maintain any of its swerve capabilities which I doubt because of the radically different coefficients of friction and we don't have encoders on every wheel. That said, I would love to be wrong.

Mainly, I'm just trying to figure out what the best course of action is moving forward. Changing things seems like a bad idea, but it may be the only way to have more success at our next regional. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks