1) Yeah fighting big colossal monstrosities or having enemies heads errupt into parasites isn't horrific or anything. Nor is the general concept of humans being controlled by parasites. And really, NONE of the Resident Evil games were actually that scary apart from that one bit in RE1 where dogs jump through a window which subsequently then has you twitching every time you walk past any window. That's about it. Resident Evil was always ironically the B-Movie in the genre it originally created.

2) Because said tank controls actually worked better on an environment you could move around freely for the most part rather than pre-rendered back drops where most of the tank control issues came from the forever switching camera angles when the backdrop changed?

3) You mean just like the vast majority of other games at the time which often involved simply hiding around a corner and taking pot shots as the AI predictably came toward you?

4) This isn't something specific to RE4 really. You either like QTEs or you don't. RE4 didn't really have them in abundance either and I think more modern games are far more guilty of doing botch jobs of them than RE4 ever was.

5) I don't really recall anything being particularly hard - let alone due to potentially cumbersome aiming and I found the controls responsive enough that aiming was never really a major issue. Infact, if anything, I recall the laser making aiming such a non-issue that it was actually hard to actually miss a target.

6) This is such a generic complaint that is more a matter of personal taste than bad game design. This criticism could be leveled at a whole host of games that have you doing the same trout from start to finish and RE itself always got a bit of rap for being too short - so heaven forbid they tried to tackle that one. As for the sniper rifle thing, really that game threw so much money and ammo at you that space or weaponry was never really a massive concern and in a game about killing things why wouldn't you make sure you have various tools of killing things at your disposal.

I honestly must've played a completely different game to you as I really don't remember the controls being at all cumbersome or tank like for me back then and the one thing that did annoy me about that game (Ashley) had nothing to do with controls. The rest of your criticisms sound more like actual personal preference issues than RE4 itself being a bad game.

SOCOM, cool, find me 5 other third person shooters that handled well and didn't switch to first person view when aiming. I legitimately can't recall there being that many of these types of games on the market at the time. As for the cover thing, yeah you're right, I was getting that mixed up with the whole barricading doors with bookcases thing etc