Hi Peter,
Yes – a range of [0,1] makes more sense in most situations rather than joystick controls. The only time it becomes a real issue is when the size of 1 unit doesn’t match up very well with the model. For example – the model is a mouse, and 1 Blender unit is like 50 times his height. To get around that situation you can give the control a parent and then scale down the parent, but then you have at least one bone in the rig that doesn’t have a default scale of 1. (This is a bigger evil in my book)
I don’t know any animators that are bothered by this type of setup. Do they prefer [0,1]? Sure. But most animator’s I work with don’t complain about anything – they just get the job done.
