Well also people tend to buy the cheapest stuff in the market... Since they're not paying anything for the games they play you expect them to shell out some cash for a good thumbstick? i had mine for years now, never really had an issue. even used it for PS3 games. But i actually spend money on the thing.
The thing is, they're all cheap crap. Flash drives are made with bottom of the barrel flash chips, pretty much universally (maybe high capacity ones are slightly higher quality since they cost more anyway). If you want decent quality, you can get it - but they have internal USB headers on them, and are designed for use in servers with software such as unRAID, which normally boots off a flash drive (and in the case of unRAID, boots
exclusively from a flash drive) in order to save drive bays for data storage and since the boot drive is primarily read only anyway. Needless to say, plugging those into a regular USB port is a bit of a hassle requiring adapters, it can be done though.