Go back and read my edit. Third person shooters were absolutely not in their infancy unless you were a Japanese developer and years behind the west already. Also, cover mechanics have nothing to do with anything since RE4 didn't actually have a cover mechanic.

Also, the argument that FPS titles had controls down but TPS didn't is utter bulltrout at face value. The only thing separating the two is that in a TPS you can see your character and the camera rotates around them. Even if it weren't for the fact that there were third person shooters getting right years before RE4 came out, there's still no excuse for a developer not realizing that you could just lift those FPS controls that work so much better than your TPS controls pretty much as is and end up with a better controlling game. In fact the only excuse I can come up with for not figuring that out years after other games did is sheer incompetence.