@reasonable
Exactly. If gamepad was good, professional UT / Quake / CS players would be plugging gamepads into their USB ports.
I remember my first FPS (Wolf 3D) - I played it with a joystick. Most FPS gamers in the early days used joysticks. Then Doom came out, we went online (modem to modem or BBS) and faced "mousers" who utterly destroyed us.