I picked an AV8R up this afternoon and the difference playing BoP was quite dramatic - my ammo fired : hit ratio in dogfights went way up. It was also much easier to line up for dive bombing than with the 360 gamepad - really like night & day in comparison. I can see what you mean by stiff rudder - my God the deflection is only 15 Deg! That has to be the smallest angle I've ever seen on a twist rudder. Still worked well enough and definitely much better than the right thumbstick on the 360 gamepad.
Unfortunately, the [Start] button failed on it within an hour of operating it. I couldn't figure out why the heck the Start menu was no longer accessible, so I switched it to Mode 2, connected it up to my PC and did the driver install. Sure enough when I accessed it's properties from the WinXP Game Controller applet, the 'Start' button remains lit as soon as any other button is pressed. A shame because everything else calibrated very nicely and precisely in Windows. Oh well, guess I going to have to decide whether to exchange it for another one or bail. Can't say I'm overly impressed with the quality after that, but at least the performance was more than adequate in BoP on the 360. Unfortunately I didn't even get a chance to try it in BA2 or AC6.