The pad on the board also came off, should have mentioned that, but if it's all for the speakers then it's ok if that doesn't work, I only care about the buttons and sticks working.
What I mean by deadzone shape is that by default inner and outer deadzones are circular, which leaves the corners of the area out of reach (see attached screenshot, that's what's supposed to happen when you hold the stick to the upper left corner).
A square deadzone on the other hand ensures that the input always goes to the corners/edges when the stick is fully pushed in a given direction (see the next screenshot, the lighter gray dot is what any games/software will see).
I used a working controller to show the difference, squaring one's deadzone is something that you're only supposed to be able to do by software and isn't default behavior (which makes sense because the sticks move in a circular motion when you max them out), and even then you have to move the stick all the way to the physical corner to make the software interpret your input as being at the corner of the outer deadzone. For me, when I move the stick on the controller I'm trying to repair about halfway the software interprets that as 100%, but because I can go beyond what it sees as 100% it lets me move the stick to the corners without squaring the deadzone at all (and I made sure that was the case and that I wasn't accidentally squaring it). I've also considered that maybe it's a software issue but I verified it wasn't by using the working controller with the same profile and it's circular, so I'm kinda lost.
My soldering skills are a work in progress so it could be something to do with that, by the way I noticed around the holes there's a dotted line or trace, is the solder supposed to make contact with that line, or is that like a border? If it's nothing to do with that then maybe I bought some bad sticks, but I'm not really sure.