GoogleVR + Gamepad = Fail

I'm trying to build a standard FPS game, with GoogleVR as my target platform.

I'm trying to put in some pretty basic gamepad controls for an FPS game: Two joysticks, face buttons and triggers

My first thought was to check out some tutorials online... There are some fantastic tutorial videos out there -but they're all for older versions of Google's SDK, we're talking back when Google was calling it the Cardboard SDK, not the GoogleVR SDK. I've tried these tutorials anyway, with the hope that I could still get it to work... It seems there are as many suggested ways to implement this as there are ways to meet complete failure. That is to say that after trying more than a dozen of these tutorials, following them point for point, I am met with failure.

I've found solutions that give me a freefalling camera that never stops (no matter how I configure collisions), and I've found countless options explaining that I just need to use the FPSController, which either breaks ALL input functionality, or simply doesn't respond to my gamepad.

I've dabbled in several code/script languages over the years, and I'm fluent in three... But I cannot seem to figure out what's causing the problem here. At this point, I'd be happy just to get a basic pre-built project where the camera and controls are already working -though the odds of that existing seem slim to none.

If anyone can please help me out or point out tutorials that actually WORK with the current GoogleVR SDK, I would greatly appreciate the assistance, I'm giving myself a migraine trying to get the thing working over here. :(