That said, I still go back to SH2 every so often, because the controls aren't bad... they're just not... immediate, I guess is the word. You turn slowly, you hit slowly, it's hard to aim your weapons with huge precision, that sort of thing.
I'll pitch in my opinions here too, quickly. Staying off-topic, sorry.
SH3 is the first in the series that I played. Finished it twice in fact. Then I tried SH2, and it wasn't bad, but I never finished that one. Not sure why, but I just dropped playing about halfway through, and never resumed. Probably had something more interesting to play at the time.
In any case, the series is good, but what prevented it from being awesome for me actually were the controls. Clumsy, slow and sometimes restrictive or borderline unresponsive. A game with a good atmosphere AND slick controls would've been a blessing.
Games with restrictive controls is one of my pet peeves. I hate it when I perform an action, and I cannot cancel the action half-way, even if it would realistically be possible. For instance, reloading in Fallout 3. If I press to reload a weapon, I can't access pib-boy, switch weapon or do anything but walk around until the reloading has finished. This is particularly annoying with stuff like Rocket Launchers, when it can take several seconds. At the point where I have a rocket in hand and am about to put it in the weapon, why can't I just cancel, put away the rocket and not reload the launcher, if that would allow me to switch to another weapon faster? Why do I have to wait three seconds for the rocket to go into the weapon, by which time the enemies are in melee combat already (which I was able predict, and thus wanted to cancel reloading), making the rocket launcher pointless, and I still have to switch to a safer weapon, usually costing me at least a bit of health. Even more annoying is reloading a laser pistol (or was it the rifle, anyways), when after inserting the battery, the character sometimes has to open the cartridge slot and slam the battery in again, before being able to shoot. It's a nice effect of a poor condition weapon, but I sure as hell don't want to spend an extra second looking at stuff like that when I want to be shooting the bad guys instead. Every time I die because of such an event increases the likelyhood that at some point I've had enough and just quit playing the game. Showing me visual effects and motions to enhance immersion is fine, but it should not affect my controls in gameplay-affecting way. When I lose in a game, I want to lose because the bad guys defeated me. Not because the game prevented me from fighting back or evading.
I don't mean to say that players should be able to perform anything at anytime, but if the actions are ridiculously long, include unnecessary extra actions and/or often restrict any other activities at the same time, without being able to cancel, it's just frustrating to control. This wasn't a huge problem in SH games though, I think. It was even possible to strafe while swinging melee weapons, unlike in a lot of games where a melee attack stops the player's movement. It's a been a long time since I played the SH games, and I don't remember exactly how the controls were, but I do remember that I found them lacking in finesse, sometimes lethally so (for the main character). Still, the atmosphere was so awesome that the controls weren't an enjoyment killer.
So, to me, clumsy controls do not contribute to atmosphere or immersion, but take away from enjoyment. Not saying I need to be able to perform ninja moves and jump around like a superhero or anything either. Just that restricting a character's available actions to very basic moves is much better way of adding a clumsy feel than making performing those moves a pain.
That's my opinion anyways.
