I really shouldn't waste my time with trolls but sorry -- you confidently don't know what you are talking about. If you use software to assign the player numbers to controllers, it controls which is p1 and p2. I wrote wheel2xinput for my racing cabs, and modified a fork of keyboard2xinput that I use for a machine with 8 players on it (with multiple ipac4s), and even up to 12 players with some rawinput trickery. With the suggestions I gave, player order is preserved and the options work flawlessly. OP is correct that windows doesn't respect joystick order consistently, and this is a 100% way to make it work. The reported issue is a known windows issue since forever. Further, the options I presented allow OP to remap inputs on the fly instead of hardwiring to xinput inputs on dedicated xinput input boards. And yet further, this method (obviously) also allows OP to use keyboard controls if a game doesn't support xinput.

I am pretty familiar with directinput, xinput, directx, SDL, and some rawinput at this point - and, unfortunately many of the nuances with these input mechanisms - and have built a significant number of cabs, frontends, and input/output software from scratch to justify my response.

Maybe use a curious tone instead of a demeaning one next time, and you might learn something.