Because to be honest, a lot of Nintendo 64 and Playstation era games actually had all kinds of messed up frame rate drops and stuff, yet few people cared as much back then.
Banjo-Tooie went at about 15 FPS at a lot of points, since the Nintendo 64 nearly died trying to run the massive game. Donkey Kong 64 had it worse, to the point the expansion pack was only used because the game would randomly crash without it.
Yet these games are seen as extremely good. More so the first, which is seen as a bona fide classic, but not disasters none the less. Does frame rate really matter that much?
Yes. Give me 60 FPS Banjo over 15 FPS Banjo any day of the week. This is like asking if resolution matters. Of course it does, the higher you go, the better the visual fidelity. The higher the framerate, the smoother the playing experience.
Also, in all fairness, a lot of us were kids when that game came out and didn't really know what framerate was or any of the other technical things going on then. I thought the slowdown in Wind Waker was cinematic. Turns out it was just the system chugging. When you're a kid, you either don't notice or don't care because you don't understand it. I got Halo on my laptop when I started college and loved it. When I really got into PC gaming later in college, I installed FRAPs on my old laptop to see how I was running the game. I was getting 10 FPS. I played the entire campaign and hundreds of hours online at 10 FPS without it hampering my enjoyment. But now that I have a better computer and can play it at 100+ FPS, I'd never go back to the 10.
Like benoit said, this is pretty much a non-debate. Yes, we were happy with our SNES'es and PS1's, because there was nothing better at the time. But now there is simply no excuse to have a framerate less than 60 for gaming, there simply is not.
The reason we still like those games is that while they are bad in their technical side, we understand the limitations at the time, and as such can't fault them for it. So yes, framerate matters - a lot!
