Much of the main talent who led the GoldenEye team at Rare (David Doak, Karl Hilton, Steve Ellis, Graeme Norgate) left to form their own studio, Free Radical Design[1]. FRD went on to release the Timesplitters games to good success, but later hit trouble and have now been bought out by CryTek and renamed CryTek UK.
Martin Hollis, the other senior member of the team also left for pastures new after working on Perfect Dark.
I'm sure Rare still has a lot of brilliant hard working team members, but the main drivers of GoldenEye have long since gone.
[1] Disclaimer: I used to work at Free Radical at one point.
I really enjoyed Viva Piniata and Kameo! Both were extremely high quality.
What is amazing about Viva Piniata was that my retired mom (afraid of turning on the computer) got interested seeing me play and started playing herself! She ended up unlocking every single feature/award in the game, and this led her to play other Animal Crossing on the GameCube. I got her the first iPad when it came out and she is now essentially a regular computer user! While Viva Piniata might not have been a commercial success, I know one life it changed and I'd bet there are a lot more.
Frankly, I wish the world had more daring developers/game companies/people. The situation with Rare isn't a good one as your quip points out. Sadly, no matter how artistically awesome your games are, without commercial success, you cannot survive. This leads to a world of xbox games where pretty much every game is a shooter. IMHO, that is why tablets are kicking console gamings behind. It seems more creative titles for tablets (and perhaps the indie game section of xbox live) than for the xbox today.
