A strong argument could be made that Goldeneye made console First Person Shooters relevant four years before Halo tried.

No.

Goldeneye didn't spawn a mass of shooters.  In itself it was an awesome and massively popular game.  I got an N64 JUST for it.

But it didn't spawn the culture of shooters Halo did.

I'm trying to figure out if you're serious and I'm coming up blank, here. What other massive shooter franchises did Halo spawn, exactly?

And that doesn't change the fact that you're moving the goal posts, here. Goldeneye sold as well as the original Halo on a smaller userbase and is still played to this day. It completely legitimized the consoles as a platform for capably made shooters in 1997.

Call of Duty for one.

And then a mass of subsequent shooters.  The genre took off in the sixth generation, primarily post-Halo.

Not after or as a result of Goldeneye.  Certainly that wonderful game showed it could be done, but Halo popularised it.

no one plays goldeneye unless they want to punish themselves.

Halo spawned all the highly popular FPS on consoles.  FPS was not a popular genre on consoles until Halo.  The controls were much better and lan made it take off.  This is like comparing Wolfenstein and Doom.  Sure, Wolf came first, but Doom launched FPS into the mainstream.  Halo did the same for console FPS.  I've never owned a M$ console and I was a PC elitist at the time denouncing Halo compared to Counter-strike and others on PC, but it deserves a lot of credit for console FPS.

Btw, last I checked the N64 sold a lot more than the Xbox.

If successful and it will be, the rts genre on consoles may just get a rep boost.

The vast majority of core gamers are blind and will always condem them, their loss.

Call of Duty was a PC title, not a console first person shooter, which saw only nominal success until the current generation actually launched that franchise into popularity.

After the Halo games, the best-selling FPS on the Xbox sold under 1.8 million units, which might be impressive but doesn't compare to the FPS success from the N64 era - even the first Turok kicked the Hell out of the vast majority of the Xbox and PS2's FPS lineup in terms of popularity and sales.

Halo did a lot of great things for the genre, certainly made it the center of the gaming world for a little while, but Goldeneye was bigger for its time, spawned more successful shooters on the N64 thereafter, and legitimized the genre in terms of playability on consoles. Legitimize meaning, of course, that it makes the genre legitimate, proving the viability of the first person shooters on a platform that wasn't the PC. Halo did not do that. Goldeneye did.

It doesn't make sense to me that they put so much effort into trying to make a conventional gamepad work with a RTS game like this one. It would have been far better to have this game (among others) usher in a new controller for the 360.

Think of it as a statement of the viability of dual joysticks in a world where IR pointers are on the edge of becoming an industry standard.

People that play PC RTS and FPS may think this, but those that play console RTS and FPS do not see them as dumbed down or slowed down at all.  Personally it is not a matter of "dumbing down" or "slowing down" the game, just a matter of adapting to different people's tastes.  To me, FPS gaming is much better suited on a console with a controller than on PC.  Sure you have higher sensitivities in PC with better aiming due to the huge DPI rating on gaming mice, but that doesn't mean it requires more skill to play on one platform than the other.  I know many PC gamers that are great at FPS but suck when it comes to console FPS.

Then there are people like me who do both, and I can attest that while they handle differently, I can play with the same amount of skill on both without any problem.  Heck, I use my Xbox 360 controller for PC FPS's every now and then and still perform equal to the others who are just using the keyboard and mouse.

The games are just as complex and difficult on whichever platform you play them on, to those respected platform users.