Well, on my machines, they are quite sensitive, I don't have to pound on
'em... As far as performance controller, you want something that you can
load a sysex string into and vary one byte of that string with the controllers.
One software is called ccmemo & it lets you do that sort of thing, remap
controllers to sysex, if you have the patience to set it up.
ccmemo should be here:
Joel