The OP says it a bit colorful, but at some points he is right, the story missions are rigid and need to be played pretty much exactly as Rockstar scripted them, fail to do so and you have to reload from a checkpoint, that is linear gameplay and is imo boring if you want freedom in a open world game.
These two concepts don't mix very well for a lot of people, some people will like it, but there are a lot of people that want freedom, there are also people that just want a good story, i like both, but i don't really like them mixed like Rockstar makes it's games.
On the one hand they give you freedom to explore the world, and you can make your own decicions, on the other they treat you like a child an d say you have to play it like this, or you will die and have to do it over and over till you get it right. the latter being pretty linear with often no real clues on how to accomplish it.
That means in story missions you often have to fiddle to find out how they want you to play it, and that is detrimental for the immersion factor. It kills the flow of the story.
Sadly the whole concept also makes for bad replayability cause the story is actually pretty good, so it will stick to you and thus a second time you play it when you know how you should play the missions you just want to skip the cutscenes because you still know very well how they went and that takes the fun out of it.
Now if they would have let the story missions have more freedom so you would solve it in multiple different ways to accomplish your goal, it would probably be a more fluent experience right from the get go and have a much higher replayability factor.
I make mods and projects in Unity so i'm a semi-pro gamedev, atleast i consider myself that, and i really think they need to learn to blend these two types of gameplay better, cause right now they kinda messed up the beautiful game they made.
And yes, the controls are archaic, and overcomplicated with to many button configurations and also to many bugs and bad default button configuration which are also detrimental for a smooth and enjoyable gameplay experience. The first person controller in this game is worse then the first one i programmed 14 years ago in Unity, and that is not good for a company that is so renowned, i would be ashamed if i where the CEO of Rockstar that i have such bad controls in my game, third person controller is better, but also has a lot of flaws if you look at it from a technical point of view animations can't be skipped, they need to play out, every modern game has crossfade animations that smoothly transit from one to another if you decide to do something else.
I mean, try a game like COD, or Borderlands, and feel how smooth the gameplay is, and compare this to the chunky, jittery, sluggish, rigid first person controller of any Rockstar game, and you'll know what i mean. Some people say that it is realistic, i can tell you it isn't, people who say that are probably extremely clumsy IRL, i have a black belt in Martial Arts, i'm fast and swift in what i do, i can hit a guy 5 times in a second, not once every two seconds. Just one of those things..if i make a cup of coffee i do that swiftly and smoothly, pretty much everything i do is smooth in my movements, that goes for everyone for the things they do each day multiple time IRL, your brain makes your mobility smooth if you often repeat your movements, it learns.
