Just bought one (for cheap) it's beyond discrete, it's one of the good ones.
1st: it's tough, the materials are pretty good and the overall build feels well designed, it reminds me a lot of the duke controller for xbox but slicker
2nd: The compatibility is ridiculous, i started playing shadow man and when i entered the menu for the controls the game had already mapped everything correctly, it was like playing the DC version that i also own and tested a short while ago, turok 2 needed to be configured but it worked perfectly afterwards, same urban chaos etc.
3rd: while it's true that start and select are not present on the front side, there's two extra buttons similar to the layout of the OG xbox controller, this makes mapping ps1\ps2\xbox games rather easy
4th: I discovered that more than 10 years ago they hacked the drivers to work on XP so you get compatibility for that OS too! https://3dfxarchive.com/hammerhead.htm
This has been my best purchase in terms of PC controllers, there's a serious lack of gameport controllers that do 2 analogs at all and this one does it well too.