Virpil makes great products. I'm wondering though if ordering a joystick base will come with the proper firmware for the exact stick Max wants to combine. If not, that will require flashing the eprom which again, hopefully, will make it an easy process.
My MT-50M2 Throttle was sold as having an 8-way POV hat but out of the box, it was a 4-way. I found nothing on the web to explain how to reconfigure the firmware for the 8-way and it took some doing to make it work. Any 4-way plus center push on this throttle can be made into an 8-way so the same is probably true with their joystick base, which I don't have.
In case anyone else wants to do this...
Seems like a good place to post this. 17 is the center button, 18-21 the 4 buttons. POVs set to 4b8w (4button8way), then the logic POV1U etc where the 1 is for logical hat number 1.