these are some really good finds. miyamoto's a pretty hardcore guy, and the goldeneye stuff is actually pretty funny as it's kind of super not the point about what goldeneye is (at least in its ending of all things). rare's comment of nintendo being jealous sounds like straight up fantasy land bullshit on their part. super mario 64 is one of the most influential games of all-time and banjo-kazooie is a glorified minigame compilation from the studio that brought you antz.
some of that stuff i'd say he's pretty on point with. generally he seems to be not so interested in presentation elements as much as mechanics. miyamoto seems to be more interested in concepts and ideas instead of artistic elements. however, i think he's fine with it if it reinforces said concept or idea. and the guy will go out there and market it even if it's not really his bag, like he did with the wind waker's cel-shaded look early on.
Miyamoto has great ideas, no one can dispute that, but restricting Nintendo's whole development effort strictly toward his guidelines at expense of creativity freedom and variety wasn't really a good decision. It's okay if he has his own visions, wants be different from everyone else and go after it, but not really at expense of different approaches than his.
This is my biggest complain and criticism toward him. He doesn't like story driven and violence on games? Fine, it's his opinion, but to jeopardize and restrict everyone else at Nintendo to develop such games is dumb. Nintendo as a first-party and hardware maker needs to have as many as variety it can in order to appeal to the general market. Being restricted to a few selected genres and ideas and the whole software decisions restricted to a single person isn't really a good idea, as Wii U failure proved.
That's why Eguchi, Koizumi and Takahashi promotions to general managers, in theory, can provide more freedom of creativity and different ideas than Miyamoto alone.
This is good. We need Nintendo to keep making Nintendo-like games across the board to compensate for the fact that nobody else is on the big budget scale.
At the end of the day it comes down to sales. There is no audience on Nintendo platforms for titles in the vein of 1080 Snowboarding or Eternal Darkness. GoldenEye always comes up as a counter example, but the thing is Nintendo couldn't follow up with that as hardware became less restrictive over time which meant software budgets skyrocketed as you could produce more and more realistic graphics.
My perception of Nintendo under Iwata is that they tried their best to be successful without abandoning their core gaming philosophy. That added criteria after the word successful is key to understanding why they don't follow business 101 logic and why Pachter is dumbfounded whenever Nintendo does something and says he can't understand some of their decisions. He was often wrong in predicting their future actions because he sees things purely from a business perspective, which is a mistake when it comes to Nintendo.
This is a common misconception in the minds of Nintendo fanboys and defenders of Iwata's tenure but actually isn't true.
Nintendo tried to differ themselves from the rest of the market with Wii and Wii U. It worked at short-term with Wii, but later on, from it's mid to late life, it lost it's momentum and suffered a premature death. It became a hollow wasteland in it's late years, even with the record breaking sales it got. Wii U failed badly. It's okay if Nintendo wants to bring new concepts and ideas into their hardware philosophy, but not at the expense of basic requirements for a competitive console, like standard controller and competitive hardware.
By the way, this costs excuses isn't really a issue for Nintendo. Some fanboys believe a single failure can put the whole company and danger, thus, avoiding them to afford to take risks. If that was the case, then Wii U's failure would have destroyed Nintendo already as they were in a three years in a row in the red situation. And here is, Nintendo is still steady and ready for a new hardware release. This high development costs excuse was actually valid in the PS3/360 days, where HD development was absurdly high, that's not anymore like this in the PS4/XBO days.
Sony is having a profit with PS4. Nintendo can afford to make high budget titles if they want to. They aren't a small studio which a single failure can put the whole company in jeopardy as many believe.
About audience, yes there was an audience for those games, especially in the SNES and N64 era. NOA did their best to appeal to those audience and made many publishing and second-party deals to many western developers in order to appeal to this crowd. 1080º was a million seller for the N64 by that time and Silicon Knight's deal that paved the way for Eternal Darkness, was made in that time. It was Nintendo's decision to concentrated the whole decision making with in NCL and strip away NOA and NOE's autonomy, shut down of the whole western gaming development, dismiss of their western second-parties and publishing deals and burned bridges with western third-parties that made Nintendo loose steam in the region. Restoring their autonomy would be a great idea, especially because Kimishima was a former NOA president. He's probably aware of the importance of this market for Nintendo's business.
About GoldenEye. Nintendo, with the Rare sellout, lost, perhaps, their biggest prospect to the genre and Microsoft was able to grab the FPS's western N64 audience. N64 was the home for console FPS play, they managed not only to loose this FPS crowd, with is huge in the western market, but mostly of it's western audience from the N64 days.