After yesterday's late night accomplishments, today I fixed up the UI of joytest a bit. It's still not quite what I think it should look like, but at least it's actually usable with a 27-axis, 19-button "joystick" (read: a PS3 controller). Things may disappear off the edge of the window, but you can scroll towards it. Also, I removed the names of the buttons and axes from the window, and installed them as tooltips instead. Few people will be interested in the factoid that "button 1" is a "BaseBtn4", anyway.
The result now looks like this:
If you plug in a new joystick, or remove one from the system, then as soon as udev finishes up creating the necessary device node, joytest will show the joystick (by name) in the treeview to the left. Clicking on a joystick will show that joystick's data to the right. When one pushes a button, the relevant checkbox will be selected; and when one moves an axis, the numbers will start changing.
I really should have some widget to actually show the axis position, rather than some boring numbers. Not sure how to do that.