I solved my own problem but I guess I'm posting in the interest of my joystick maybe working in future versions of Dosbox.

Bought a Logitech Attack 3 tonight, set it up fine, working in windows (Vista 32 bit).
Would not respond in dosbox 0.73, not in X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, nothing.
It showed up in the console as recognized and correctly identified.
I tried everything from 2axis, 4axis, auto, timing true, timing false, swap34, etc, always got same result (no response from stick or any buttons, sometimes random slow pulling to a diagonal unaffected by stick in any way).

Finally found this:
http://www.reloaded.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=3283
And sure enough it just worked straight away in 0.65.

Afterwards I checked again in these forums and found the bit about setting "default for old programs" and the alternate SDL.DLL, neither of those helped 0.73.

Anyway that's my experience, I feel like sound's a bit wonky in .65 and it'd just be nice to have a single dosbox installation so I'd like to see this fixed. Not to sound ungrateful, with all the joy I've got from dosbox what's a few pulled out hairs :P

Let me know if there's any more information I can give.