It would require extensive rebalancing and retooling, but I believe the game would come out the other side stronger. If your game requires "bad" controls to be "good", the problem lies with the underlying design.
No, there's no design underlying controls in a game. Controls are the most fundamental part of any game - pretty much a point of genesis in a way - and if a developer deliberately limits your degree of control, it's part of the game's core design.
You don't have to like a deliberate control scheme, but to issue a blanket statement that it's "bad" is a gross misnomer.
By most accounts, unresponsive controls are bad, but if they're
deliberately slower to respond, they elicit a methodical style of play. Demon's Souls is predicated in part on slow, methodical gameplay, and to make the game quicker to respond would change the very mindset it instils in a player. And again, you don't have to like Demon's Souls for this to remain true.
Racing games are perhaps the most telling. If you don't give the vehicles characteristics besides doing precisely what you desire, you remove the very point of many racing games. It's harder to control Forza cars than Mario Karts because they, essentially, control
worse. You can elect to make the same true for a character based game, and it is in no means a "bad" design inherently.
I frankly find this attitude depressing, and it has homogenised controls across all games to a point where few developers even try to change the feel of a game through the way you interact with it. Gunvalkyrie is certainly a bit on the clunky side today, but I sometimes go back and really appreciate how bonkers that game feels to play. There's a unique kind of satisfaction you get from a game that you truly have to wrap your mind around, as opposed to it snugly fitting into your preconceptions of what a game with a certain look controls like, only to promptly leave you feeling like you played
one of those games.
The Souls games are beloved not just for their structure and their level of challenge, they're also genuinely games you couldn't bring preconceived notions to. People who love those games overcame the obstacle of
learning to like it - a notion far more powerful than it's given credit for these days when the fundamentals of a game are nearly identical across the board.
Which is not to say there isn't value in a universal control "language" for most games, but that should in no way be considered a norm developers have to follow.