A possible solution that I am spit-balling that may be able to make use of Benjamin's HidGuardian in a more stable manner and may even be backwards compatible with IM 1.6.
I neglect to mention however that HidGuardian is STILL, and has a good chance of remaining, only compatible with USB and the official Sony Wireless Dongle (http://amzn.to/2nZ5akN). Seriously if you haven't switched over to one of these things yet you really should.
HID is a device class assigned to any device that takes physical user input and transforms it into application regignized input.
An input protocol developed by microsoft in the mid 90's designed to attempt to standardise communication between input devices and games. Direct input has been mostly replaced by XInput for most gaming devices, but Direct input remains fully supported by Microsoft due to the fact that complex devices such as flight sticks and wheels require it due to the more complex and higher number of inputs.
The latest name of the controller mapping development project.
To my surprise, this actually worked! Wrote the service yesterday and coupled with HidGuardian this brought exclusive mode back to 1.6 as well as 1.7. A little more testing to do but the results are already very promising.