I've been working with the people on the SDL bug tracker and it looks like this fix will be put into both SDL1 and SDL2. So, after their release schedule and Linux distribution release schedules and people update their installations, this will be fixed.
Point camera between plane and horizon, and use "life-size" zoom. (includes patch as example)
Here's a better patch, which ensures that the endpoints of each axis become -32767 and +32767. Even though SDL already had code to do that, it wasn't doing it correctly, even before my previous patch. Rather, it was over-shooting those endpoints and then clipping the result. So not only were there dead zones in the middle of each axis, but there were dead zones at each end as well.
Compile failure in 0.9.13, src/mod_video/crrc_animation.cpp:87
Deadzone in Joystick Axes in Linux