It surely has its technical flaws but that’s not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.
Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn’t have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.
Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn’t so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.
Too many games I’ve seen conflate being evil with being a jerk. Few games let you play the ‘long game’ where you are specifically nice and cooperative to deceive and manipulate. I think this partly due to decisions being made modular and point to point. Your overall morality then is calculated as some form of average of all the decisions you made. Mass effect series comes to mind.
But if you want to play as a scheming villain the opposite should be the case: you set your primary long term goal (eg taking over a country or institution) and then your actions are chosen in the vein of that goal. And those actions might in isolation actually be seen as beneficial or benign. But you ultimately do them to gain trust or deceive.