You are correct- the joystick flags need to be enabled when compiling- the build we use didnt enable them when they compiled the repo. So we may look into compiling it ourselves in the future but it all pends on the repo we pull from now when they update to kodi 15. may be a while before we get it all sorted. Of course you can always try to compile it yourself (but its a headache and I haven’t figured out how to do it myself yet) so until then unless you have an xbox 360 controller, I don’t know of any simple way to integrate joypad controls in kodi. I typically just use the yatse app on my smartphone.