Does your laptop have a replaceable wireless card by chance? Could get a combo board with wifi and bluetooth like the intel ax series of boards if you can. I use a m.2 ax200 in my desktop.
If your system has a free PCIe slot you should be able to find a wifi card that will work. I personally am using an intel wifi board for bluetooth and have not had any problems with bluetooth. Their driver seems to be really stable on linux and in kernel and should be stable on windows as well. I got my m.2 card for about $20(usd) and wouldn’t expect that big of a difference for a standard PCIe card.
I’d suggest checking section 5.3 of the arch linux wiki gamepad page. Debian probably either has an older version of the related package or retroPie might have extra patches. Could not say what package for certain though. Arch Wiki Gamepad
Sorry, I misunderstood. What controller are you using? It seems odd that only jstest is detecting it. I initially needed to use an enviroment variable for my Steel series Stratus duo, but I think that was a layout issue.
You have pipewire. It is compatible with pulseaudio. I find it very surprising that you don’t show aac. I am not familiar with sbc-xq, but Apple products don’t support ldac and my understanding is sdc is not useful for audio listening, but rather calls. My M4s work fine on my desktop with an intel ax201 Bluetooth chipset. I have been using aac there, but ldac worked I think. I had problems with the usb BT adapter before that though.