Ok... just that after going through 6-7 cycles, the odds of some kind of cruft being left behind keeps increasing
I really made sure everything that would be able to corrupt the install was gone from the game, AppData and steam to deleting the mod launcher redownloading it fresh alongside the patcher I made sure that everything was gone.
Fair enough, it's the concept that's important... The idea is to remove DS4Windows as a possible source of your difficulties by using a Windows-native controller. Whether that's Logitech (I used the F310 only because it's an example of a near-copy of the original PS1 controller), Razer, or whoever doesn't really matter.
Normally I do not use DS4windows as I do not need it, the odd thing is that the game did work and the controller did work before all this was happening which leads me to the assumption that the next thing you say may have something to do with it.
It could be that a recent Windows update silently broke a piece of DS4, and simply reinstalling that might solve things.
I downloaded the latest version and removed the one I had completely, but, this didn't solve anything either so far.
Don't give up so easily... tell us more about what you've tried (besides just "various tips and tricks"), and what's happening (or not). Does the controller work for everything except FF7? Does Cloud move up when you press left on the joystick? Are the buttons remapped into odd locations each run? It sounds like you might have a setup that's hard for others to reproduce, but I've been playing games since the days of the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the folks who actually hack (in the true sense of the word!) the game to make these mods have a wealth of knowledge concerning how these things work "under the hood."
I really do not want to give up, honestly, I wonder if it is all worth it to even figure it out. I still have my older XBOX controller which does work and therefore I have an alternative even when the controller does not feel entirely good anymore due to old age.
First time installing Final Fantasy VII the game worked perfectly with the controller out of the box, I was looking for some graphical mods since I also use such mod on my Final Fantasy VIII so I was wondering if they would exist for Final Fantasy VII too. I ended up bumping upon the 7TH Heaven mod launcher and followed every single instruction to the letter. Everything worked perfectly, I've been streaming the game on my twitch channel and youtube channel up until Christmas Eve and after the new year I wanted to boot it up again but ended up with those issues mentioned in post one.
I then went through the entire troubleshoot page for 7TH HEAVEN up till the point that I ended up reinstalling everything, but somewhere along the line I kept having issues with errors related to settings not set up properly and according to the troubleshoot page I also may have updated the mod launcher to 1.55 which was not the case at any time of any installation. The first thing I always do is read the section with possible issues and the first thing I noticed was to avoid updating the launcher to the latest version, to begin with so I avoided doing as such at all times. However, something kept going wrong so I went through the AppData ended up in my regedit and removing all the HKEYS and anything related to Final Fantasy VII.
To some extent I know how to deal with troubleshooting so I made sure everything related to FF7 was eliminated, I restarted my rig with a clean boot. I continued reinstalling everything step by step as instructed on the 7TH HEAVEN Guide. I finally had the modded version working without any errors or issues on launch. It all worked out of the box with the XBOX controller as mentioned but when I tried or try to use the PS4 Controller instead of the XBOX Controller nothing seems to happen.
I also tried to launch through steam but it still does not seem to work even with the PS4 Controller support enabled so I really think I used every option to my personal experience to solve this. I am missing something or it just does not want to work at all. ... What I do know is that prior to these issues my PS4 controller worked perfectly with the modded version when launched through steam now it does not work anymore.
For that reason alone I also reinstalled steam during this process so I am sure this is not the issue either.
I do not know what or how but every game I own with controller support does seem to work with my PS4 Controller except final fantasy 7, maybe something broke with the latest windows 10 update who knows I personally don't see where the problem lies.
Best of regards.