Joystick doesn't update, motors don't drive until button press

[faraz5557]

We have a button that activates a command to set the mode of our CANTalons (eg. Percent vs speed vs something else I cant remember) to Percent (which should be the default mode). When we deploy our code and try to run the robot in teleop, the robot doesn't move, the Joystick values don't update on the SmartDashboard (especially weird! What does the CANTalon modes have to do with the joystick readings?), until we press the button, then both of those things start working normally and expected (though sometimes the driving is noticeably slower than other times, strange.) It's using ArcadeDrive I believe.

We tried in our init methods to basically emulate the button, by creating a new modeChangeCommand object and running execute() on them (so basically the driver doesn't have to press the button to start driving) but this doesn't work, apparently it's not the same as pressing the button. Did this in multiple places.

How to fix this? This didn't happen last year. Our CANTalons are on 2.2 firmware, and downgrading them all to 2.0 didn't help. Another team member suspects something has changed on the CANTalon end about the different modes the controllers can be in.