Hello
Yes I understand, those cards are easy. DesFire cards have a different inner working. But the RC522 should be capable of reading it.
The problem with DesFire is that there is an OS running on those cards, and they need more power than the outdated (and unsafe) Mifare cards. El cheapo card readers are sometimes not perfectly wired or use sub-standard components.
But it seems to be possible to alter them to actually read DesFire cards, see this page:
https://revspace.nl/RC522Hacking
I ordered a few to destroy them with my bad soldering.
Altough that's only the hardware side, reading the bits and bytes is part 2. But I cannot say anything useful about that because my readers are somewhere in the pacific.
That's why I asked that question on the final line, does anything happen at all? Are you getting giberish data? Or does nothing happen at all when you read your DesFire cards?