Didn't take long for me to realize Far Cry 3 was better with a gamepad on PC. Most games are nowadays. Some games like Tomb Raider and Middle Earth let you seamlessly switch from gamepad and mouse with on the fly UI changes for all the prompts. Far Cry might do that as well. I just chill out roaming around stealthing with the gamepad and switch to mouse if I need to snipe.
Honestly controllers are way better designed for everything but strategy games than a mouse. Get with the times grandpas
Hell I just use fan made drivers to use a PS3 controller as an Xbox on Windows and it works flawlessly with every game so I didn't even have to buy anything.
I spent my first six hours or so in Far Cry 3 hunting wild animals for their pelts and doing all the crafting stuff. You are really missing the point of the game if you obsess over the shitty characters and cutscenes instead of you know free roaming the environment. Assaulting strongholds with stealth or over the top action is the whole meat of the game, try focusing on that.
Thx for the tip, I actually am doing exactly that. I'm not chasing the main quest because it just is not appealing in any way, neither are the characters, cheesy as fuck especially they whiny main hero and his friends. The mohawk dude is ok, like him.
I spent last hours roaming arround being randomly attacked by tigers and shit

. What kinda buggs me is, I get to an area crawling with pirates, clear it loot it, half an hour later I decide to progress a bit with the main quest, it sends me back there like nothing happened (somebody necromanced the pirates I guess) on some bogus go here kill him disable this mission. Also stealth in this game is terrible.
I also play it on an xbox controller like most of the first/third person singleplayers, you can just feel the game was made to be played like that. Used to own X360, played Halo and CoD online, so I'm quite used to the aiming and controlls, it feels better imo.