If you can perform what the game asks if you with new problems, then the controls are fine. Everything about the game is designed around the controls. How was it's impact fleeting? It literally did akimbo weapons first and then they were perfected in Perfect Dark. The split screen local multiplayer with different modes. Not to mention the first shooter with true force feedback. Lot of revisionist history here.
Sorry, but that's a stupid argument imo, and ties in perfectly with what I said before in regards to it being the Sonic Adventure of FPS games... as that's exactly the defense many Sonic Adventure advocates will fall back on to argue that the game's controls weren't disastrous compared to modern platformers. You have stuff like AGDQ demonstrating that people can be immensely proficient at literally any game in existence, so by this logic there's basically been no game made that isn't mechanically sound. The vast, vast majority of people that attempt to play GoldenEye - both back then and today - will be subjected to some of the worst firefights in multiplayer FPS history, as a result of it's unwieldy controls... I could pull down the first 10 GoldenEye deathmatch clips off YouTube right now, and be pretty confident that every last one would show awful gunplay... whereas I can imagine you'd struggle to find a single clip of anyone playing it with this deadly precision you're claiming your friend had.
Also, GoldenEye didn't do akimbo weapons first... both Marathon games (also by Bungie... look at that!!) had them before it, and mechanically dual-wielding didn't take the form as seen today, where each gun could actually be independently fired until I believe Halo 2 (correct me if I'm wrong). This is actually another situation where Halo's implementation has survived to the current day, whereas GoldenEye's hasn't.
Splitscreen multiplayer I can give it, although that was more a universal N64 standard (Duke Nukem 64 for example also contained split screen multiplayer modes - including campaign co-op - but neither the Saturn or PlayStation Duke Nukem 3D ports do). Force feedback is literally just a hardware occurrence... that's Starfox 64 if anything. Nothing FPS specific came out of that.
Now don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed playing GoldenEye back in the day (though we switched it out with Turok 2 and Quake 2 later, because both simply played better)... but you can look at games today, and see that for a variety of reasons, they've basically pretended GoldenEye didn't exist, and looked directly at Halo instead.
GoldenEye did very little to actually make FPS games work on a console in a serviceable manner, and pretty much no other games released after it gained any notable momentum as a result of the things it implemented. And this
isn't just down to the lack of dual-analog as standard either. Sony had that covered back on the PS1, with Alien Resurrection first making use of them... but stuff like Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life, Deus-Ex and the like all still played like shit with a joypad, even post GoldenEye (with none adopting anything from it mechanically).
Halo brought the Z-axis aim assistance (sticky aim), that made things
actually work on a console, and defined gameplay templates that you see in almost every console shooter by standard now. Sticky aim? Halo. Regenerative health? Halo. Grenade button? Halo. Two weapon inventory? Halo. Vehicular controls? Halo. Fucking online matchmaking? Halo. Etc. Halo's influence on the FPS genre is ridiculous and plainly visible in nearly everything since... list GoldenEye's, and cite what still uses them (or ever even did back then). Whilst much of what Rare did with GoldenEye and Perfect Dark were great ideas (such as difficulties changing objectives), they aren't things that have been very influential on other games at all. I can't think of a single game outside of GoldenEye, Perfect Dark or Timeplitters that uses that aiming system for example... not even amongst games released in that time window.
