In my experience there are a couple of things which cause the nubs to drift.
Unfortunately the two main culprits are physical :-(.
Resetting rarely helps much unless for some odd reason calibration gets skewed or you reset when the nub is not centered. Anyways, you should do the nub dance after each reset and therefore a timed reset (one you don't know about) would not help. To my understanding the nub controller chip tries to find the extremes of the analog signals to figure out where center is. Logically drifting should then not start occuring very quickly after a nubdance, but for some reason it does seem to happen if you hold the stick steady in a position for a long time for example while driving something that has throttle in the analog stick forward direction (I only ever noticed this in PC racing games which I only tried for a quick fix of nostalgia
. So, apparently the chip also forgets old extremes and tries to adapt somehow? I don't know exactly and I don't think the firmware for the nub control chip is available for checking?
I reset the nubs on every wakeup from sleep and have taken the habit to circle the nubs a couple of times before I start using the device and that is always enough before the problems become more physical...
Anyway, the next problem makes sense after the above description: signal loss due to oxidation/dirt in the nub. The nub is a more advanced version of what your average remote control has for buttons. And those also suffer from dirt and oxidation. I've reused one cleaned nub successfully, but it only lasted for maybe a year after cleaning, because...
There's the more severe issue: at first you get drift, but the nub still returns to the physical center. Eventually it doesn't go to the exact center, but close enough and at that point you start getting slight drift. I tend to correct this by "tapping" the nub back to center without even realizing it when it starts to happen. The mouse cursor tells nicely where center is (stops drifting), but games are more tricky :-(. However, finally the nub will no longer return to center at all at which point the drift will be pretty bad and also unpredicatble. Cleaning will not fix that: the rubbery bits inside the nub simply first "tire", then finally there's a tiny "rip" somewhere and then eventually the whole middle part of the nub rips from the circling area. At that point you no longer know where the parts might be and the nub is done for because the bits and pieces or rubbery bits start moving and rolling on top of each other and giving totally haywire signals.
How long this takes totally depends on how much and how you use the nubs, I'd imagine.
So, what helps? Simply cleaning already does require disassembly of the nub :-(. The tiny screws that hold the plastic to the nub PCB (which has the metal contacts) are of course in the bottom of the nub and that bottom is soldered to the Pandora mainboard. Over the years I've had to change the nubs multiple times. I ordered a fair supply of them from ED after I had to examine the first failed one and I figured the way there were built they were bound to break eventually and therefore anything I'd order would be put to use eventually. Though I still have a couple unused ones, I've also cleaned any that are not totally broken. If you have replacements, it's more convenient to put in a replacement and then figure out later whether the nub is broken or fixable via cleaning. My Pandora nubusage has finally started to drop as more and more apps requiring mice have become "impossible to use anyways", so I'm pretty hopeful the last nubs I install will already be installed while I listen to music from a brand new Pyra. But who knows
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Word of warning: unsoldering the nubs, though not terribly difficult, can be challenging and definitely takes patience and some time. The contacts are all around the nub and each one of them also takes an electric signal somewhere. You basically loosen them one tiny fraction of a millimeter at a time (I tend to try and push a piece of oven-ok'd bakingpaper between the mainboard and nubpcb solder joints). If you heat the joint too long or forcefully try to lift one joint while the others are still too " low" , you risk viadamage to the mainboard :-(.
Pretty cool though, that the Pandora is still so important a part of my daily electronics that the nubs keep breaking and new ones are needed. The last nub soldering operation to my unit was done at about the turn of the year and I had lived with a single nub for a couple of tedious months at that time already!-)
