I know the detection only at startup has always been the case. It's not a regression, but it's still an issue. It wasn't a big deal in the early days as most people used a joystick connected to a game port on their tower PC at that time, but it is getting more problematic as new peripherals, especially wireless controllers, are very likely to be turned on or connected after startup on modern computers. Also, the GTK3 version introduced a serious new issue which makes it impossible to reconnect a...
joystick hot-plug issues on Windows