I think I finally got the controller to start working ok by cobbling together a fix with help from folks in this thread. The video @juiceua76 posted helped a lot and @oNyeo 's mention of turning both Origin and Steam's overlay also helped. I also turned on "Use the Big Picture overlay when using a Steam input enabled controller from the desktop" in the Steam In-Game settings. So far I have played about an hour with no controller problems.
I seriously hope EA fixes this. I still am in disbelief that EA released a game on their own launcher/app that doesn't have something like controller support ready to go on day one. I've never experienced this on any other PC game with controller support, especially a AAA game.
