After
Rare kind of built itself on Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto's guidance (I think Diddy Kong Racing came about because they prototyped a monster truck game, Miyamoto saw it and said 'Yeah, you should really make a kart racer with Diddy Kong and friends'). When Microsoft bought them out, yeah they had more money to play with but Microsoft didn't/doesn't know the first thing about developing games. So the studio pretty much went to shit and had few successes. I think Microsoft paid like $300 million for Rare. There's no way it's worth anywhere near that now
Define 'obscure talent'.
See, I actually think Assault had the best voice acting, because Nintendo actually went and hired proper actors. They don't do that any more because they're too cheap and too greedy to pay union actors, with the result being that the English voice acting for a lot of their work ends up being shit. Personally, I honestly think the reason they retired Charles Martinet as Mario was because they didn't want to keep paying him union rates. So they got Kevin Afghani, who is an anime voice actor (i.e. not even SAG)