Nintendo is being sued over defective Joy-Cons

What is this weird Joy Con Drift thing anyway?

I haven't got any issues with joy cons yet, I hope it won't happen.

The drifting is very easy to fix by pressing the affected button again, I don't understand why that's so big of a problem.

What? That sounds like something that can happen with all controllers, so why are people making it into a big deal with the Nintendo Switch?

And, occasionally, in Splatoon 2, the camera will slowly rotate counterclockwise. I don't know if it's because I'm tilting my controller or because of this drift problem, but it soon fixes itself.

And besides, aren't stuff such as dead zones and neutral position re calibrating supposed to fix this kind of problem?

I thought, while games are loading, the games makes the current position of the control stick the new neutral position to prevent drifting. It's why, when you have the stick pressed all the way in one direction, the highlighted option in menus change on their own and you have to unplug the controller and plug it back in to fix it.

A dead zone makes it so that no input from the control stick will be registered until the control stick is moved a certain radius, typically 1/4 the maximum. I'm a computer science major, and I MADE a few games that use control sticks from scratch using C++ and Simple Directmedia Layer in my free time for fun. Dead zones are basically game design 101. It's one of the first things you should implement when making a game that uses a control stick.

Aren't these 2 systems intended to PREVENT drifting? What's going on then? Why is drifting even an issue then?

Nintendo never really ignored the problem. Just send the Joy-Cons to their support and they'll repair them for free. I did that at the end of last year and had no problems at all. Of course they can't remote-fix the problem, because it's a fault inside the hardware. I also doubt they'll be able to improve the problem much on new devices. With the Joy-Cons being this small, building them in a way where they last long just isn't that simple. Personally, I feel like the situation is blown a bit out of proportion.

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Well, I have 4 joycons and they all drift, it's kind of hard to play Mario maker comfortably if Mario just decides to fly towards the right of the screen and takes the camera with him.

Have you ever tried navigating the home menu when it accepts both sticks as input, and both of them are making the selection flip up and down between your games, the user selection, and the options all while running over to the "see all games" button. I've used up a few cans of air trying to fix them, but it always goes right back to the problem in a few minutes.
Don't try to say its not that big of a deal when it's legitimately making simple things in almost every game a hassle. That said, nintendo is offering to fix the problem for free, without proof of purchase, and without a warranty, so I'm going to try and send my joycons to them before I get angrier about it.

I actually really like the joycons, they're cute and the stick is surprisingly not bad for use with platformers, it doesn't make me miss the dpad honestly. It just straight up sucks that they have to be this way (not counting the poor wireless signal, my god. Lets go pikachu and TWEWY could have been so much better without the crappy reception)

The explaination for why the Joy-Con control sticks drift: They use graphite contact. Graphite conducts electricity but with a big electrical resistivity (i.e. the bigger the distance, the bigger the resistance). The downside: It is pretty soft which makes it good for pensils. As a result, the problem is a hardware problem so no calibration can ever help.
Of course, you can say "BuT wHy NoT uSe NoRmAl StIcKs?" Well, RPG Hacker already mentioned the reason: "With the Joy-Cons being this small, building them in a way where they last long just isn't that simple". If you have ever looked at a control stick, you'll notice that the mechanism is pretty big, at minimum as high (or slightly smaller) as the stick itself and slightly bigger width (the sample applies to the Joy-Con sticks, mind you). In other words: A normal control stick simply is too high to fit in a Joy-Con! The only control sticks which can work are either not very durable (which the Joy-Con currently use), expensive or have to use circle pads (there is a reason why they're commonly used in mobile devises even if they have got a couple other problems).

Fwiw, have to say this is a pretty rare issue statistically. Even considering that though, half the time it's not a hardware issue, the other half they promptly replace after sending in. About the only downside is not having controllers while you send them in. But if you keep a Player 2...