We went through the same thing and after trying several universal remotes and so called great replacement remotes for the AppleTV remote I finally just for the heck of it took out an Panasonic remote I had from a Blu-Ray player I bought probably 8 years ago and sure enough it worked great. So I ordered 2 more online (it took a while to find them) and they also work perfectly. The model number is N2QAKB000076. Stay with this one. I tired a couple of other old Panasonic remotes I had and they were not workable. For some reason this one is. Here is a link at Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-N2QAKB000076-Remote/dp/B003XNA4QQ . TTHEY ONLY HAVE USED ONES BUT I ALSO FOUND ONE ON eEBAY THAT WAS NEW AND IT WORKED PERFECTLY. tHESE ARE NOT EASY TO FIND SO IF YOU TRY ONE AND IT WORKS i WOULD BUY AN EXTRA. tHEY ARE NOT EXPENSIVE.

You'll notice there is a place for TV Volume and power on top in red ( not the big round red power button but the smaller one) also but then under the open close button on the upper right there is a receiver volume button.

Anyway I use the smaller red button on top for turning the TV on and off and the volume button under receiver for my volume. Otherwise you can set the other buttons like play, pause, stop etc to the corresponding button on the AppleTV remote.

There are a couple of things you have to be creative with when initially setting it up. As an example when it comes to the AppleTV menu button, this remote does not have a menu button so when I was setting this up in the AppleTV settings I selected the function menu to be my menu button because it is big and easy to hit with my right hand finger. You can choose something else but honestly this has worked great for over 6 months. It makes it so much easier to use AppleTV. You can't use siri with any replacement remote but it is worth the trade off to me.

Hope this helps.