Nintendo 64 replacement controllers

[Mia]

For TL;DR, skip to * below.

Over the years, I always took pride in that long after the N64's time, while many people had sticky, loose, broken controllers, mine were still in great shape.

Until recently in my life, I still had multiple good-working N64 controllers. I found a new girlfriend and our N64 collections merged. We moved a few times. We're down to like one of her now kinda good 1st party controllers and one of mine, also my fully-functioning but shitty as fuck 3rd party controller with stubby arms.

Now we're in a living situation where a bunch of people are playing Nintendo 64, and we have the only good controllers.

I've talked my friend into getting a few so that people don't have to be using ours too much.

Ours are now finally showing the first signs. The noticeable white build-up, the slightly uneven resistance in different directions..

*

So anyway, the point of this thread though is I wanna ask:

It seems like it's hard or impossible to find reasonably 'new' quality 1st party controllers. It does seem like it's possible to find controllers ranging from slightly worse than ours to slightly better than ours, in a sort of random grab bag kind of fashion, over the internet anyway.

I'm weighing my options as to whether I should:

A) Order some 1st party controllers that claim to be in great condition over the internet.

Go on a journey to far away vintage video game stores, where I can inspect and feel any controllers before buying them.

or

C) Are any of the 3rd party controllers which are still available new-in-packing, good enough to be worth it? Are the joy-sticks similar feeling but better working than Nintendo's? Do any of the controllers have an overall shape close enough to the original controller that I won't vomit while trying to use one?

(This © is one of the most key questions here, because it's hard to get reputable reviews on some of this crap.. [it also happens to be the only part of this entire post containing question marks...)