I have a normal Xbox 360 controller. I mean- playing was still possible. Dpad worked normally.
Btw- how big was your team? Just out of curiosity, because, while there's a lot of good submissions, yours have a really high level of polish!
If you check out mu game, you'll notice I've the mechanic your team considered- picking up stuff that boss dropped to craft items. What we didn't do was the crafting menu- we felt that it slowed down the gameplay, and we were going for pretty fast gameplay.