Everyone in GE64 was just too busy shooting walls with the very occasional hit thanks to the joystick imprecision
This statement could not be any more untrue and it sounds to me like you never played Goldeneye 64, either that or you were bad at it. That was the whole point of the target on Goldeneye which me and people I played against always made great use of, there were plenty of quick kills when we used to play, even long distance and the pad precision was brilliant (Provided they weren't worn out). I've got Perfect Dark on my Xbox 360 and sometimes its just unplayable without the precision of an N64 controller.
However, I agree with this post in that the gameplay suffers in comparison to the original, but what can be done about it? Maybe a piece of code that compensates for the lag and alters the mechanics accordingly during the loading process, or even while the games running.