One of the biggest issues with pad which has been there for years is the lack of trigger travel. Not only is the travel physically limited when you press the triggers. You only get around 80% use of that travel before your 100% on throttle/Brake in game. Last 20% is in effect a deadzone. Getting use of that 20% wouldn't just make it easier to feed in the throttle, but you'd also know when your at maximum due to knowing when trigger hits 100%. With no controller settings in game that you can change to gain that 20% back. Increasing linearity helps but you still only get 80% travel.
I use a dual sense edge and there's no controller trigger settings to mitigate that either.
However if you change throttle and brake to right stick. You do get 100% of the stick travel. Problem is using the right stick feels so foreign to me. Id have to completely retrain thousands upon thousands of hours of muscle memory.
As for steering input I'd highly recommend you try increasing maximum wheel rotation. I think default is 400. Increase it by atleast 100. It'll take a little getting used to but it wheel help. YouTubers will tell you to reduce it. Those YouTubers primarily play on wheel and as we know wheel and pad are not the same. Also one other thing that massively helped me. I used to use Kontrol Freak extender sticks on my standard dual sense which made it easier to be more precise with my steering inputs and overall make me smoother. Now I have dual sense edge I use the longer sticks plus I can map the sticks to exactly how i want them
