No, that's annoying. I rather like the "next-gen" style - the worse you do, the more the game tries to help you.

As for JJGBA, well, I'm probably the most supportive person of it in the whole community, doing a remix album (still in the works!) and incorporating bonds with it to my other fanworks, but I do admit it has its flaws. Then again, every other JJ game has. Love is about accepting the bad sides, not ignoring them.
Also, take notice it's a GBA game, so it's meant to be short and simple just so you can play it while on a train or having a free hour in school. Understanding that, I like the classic side-scroller shooter gameplay, the short but catchy music, the artistic design and a few jokes. What I don't like is, like UR said, bad character control (try to aim for the sewer platforms on the first try, I dare you, I DOUBLE DARE YOU) and a somewhat uncreative arsenal. I can understand the pointlessness of the Blaster - it's actually good that finally the player is tempted to use other, ammo-depleting weapons over that one - but all these other guns are nearly the same and still can be annoying. The machine gun is an all-around weapon, but it quickly becomes too weak and eats up ammo way too fast, even when there's plenty of it because when fighting a tougher enemy you feel like wasting it, plus your health and your precious time. The Ricochet Gun, save for a few obscure gimmicks, is practically a grenade launcher without a gravitational pull, and for that I often used it instead of grenades... but just like them, it has a blast radius that can hurt Jazz as well, plus it has this weird lag between pushing the fire button and shooting, sometimes. The Flamethrower is mostly pointless and really finds a use only when you want to shoot an enemy behind a thin wall or you're running around like a freak spreading fire all over the place hoping something (or rather someone) catches on it. The rocket launcher is cool, but just like the Ricochet Gun it has this weird lag, can't shoot in mid-air and there's never enough ammo for it, and finally the Big Gun is an eleventh hour superpower that isn't super at all and unless you use some GameShark code you ALWAYS GET ONLY THREE SHOTS IN THE ENTIRE GAME, ALL FOR THE LAST PLANET. And after you kept it for Dark Shell, you shoot the thing and think "wow, that's all the big deal?" But I guess that's the joke.

Then again, it's not like, say, JJ2's pepperspray is an all-purpose weapon, and even though JJGBA is still the weakest of the series, it's fun. Just don't try to compare it to the older games too much. This is the same reason why Unreal 2 suffered way more than it should.