This has been my biggest frustration with Macs. I've never been able to get used to the weird mouse acceleration curve. Using a non-Apple mouse usually makes things a little better, but it's still just not right. I even tried installing a 3rd party tool once to fix the issue, but it didn't help much.

Was it SmoothMouse[0]? We likely have different needs but I've been pretty satisfied since installing it, especially for my trackball.

[0]: http://smoothmouse.com/

Based on screenshots, it seems like it, but it's been a few years, so if it hasn't been around that long, then no.

wow, that really improved the feel of the mouse in OSX for me, thanks alot!

Yes, played entire Portal/Portal2 on it. It was fine. Maybe you should be railing at game developers that port to the Mac but then don’t update their acceleration curves to fit the platform. That’s the problem, when games are developed on Windows with the Windows mouse curve and then never adjusted on the Mac port.

Maybe this can help for games that don't bother to adjust/disable acceleration:

    defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1
    defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.trackpad.scaling -1

I could care less about programmable buttons, but my RAT5 required a kext installed along with the companion software to work properly (hover bugs and whatnot), and it does not seem to have any acceleration, even outside games (I did not use the above settings)