The gyro trackball combo certainly works the best so far, even with the limited time I've put into practising and getting used to it, but I have had a lot of success with using a thumb rolling technique for precise aiming situations, that I can now do quite quickly.
For the pad, I set its sensitivity quite low, medium feedback and friction, added rotation to the orientation of the pad by about 30 degrees. Increasing the smoothing a little also helped massively, as I like to use a light touch that ends up being a bit shaky. I basically set it up so that, from the centre of the pad, by touch only I can get to see about 80 degrees further swiping left / right, so from the left most point to the right I go through about 160 degrees.
A gentle flick from the centre should get me a 90 degree turn, and a slightly stronger flick gets me a full 180. As forcefully as I can flick using the whole pad, usually gets a bit over 400 degrees. Making sure I can consistently get that, helps massively.