These statements are kinda contradictory though. In 343's defense, how were they supposed to make more games without eventually filling in the rest of the blank spaces Bungie left in the story?
I haven't warmed up to 4 at all over time. I thought I'd be able to like it after picking up the MCC, but it just is laughably bad compared to the 3 games it comes before. Every Halo game has their faults, but 4 is really hard to play sometimes, especially since the forerunner faction is a chore to fight at best and the game loves to make you fight hordes of those dog ones.
Haha Alpha Crawlers go brrrrr
Yeah, the Prometheans were pretty terrible, and one of the very few things I'll give Halo 5 credit for is that I think it improved on them slightly. Slightly.
If we were just talking about CE I'd agree, but by Halo 3 Cortana was straight up spouting lines from The Fall of Reach, and then in Reach the Spartan-IIIs and Halsey were finally introduced in the games. Engineers finally showed up as enemies in ODST, as well, being the only Covenant race from the lore not yet fought. So, they definitely started creating a metaplot and including lore elements as the series went on. In fact, you could argue this all started when Bungie was convinced to use ODSTs in Halo 2. Believe it or not, they were first created for The Fall of Reach and Bungie had absolutely no idea what role they served in the UNSC, so they weren't even going to put them in the games. They had to be convinced by Trautmann and Boren to include them.
I believe Bungie's logic when it came to making Reach is that they didn't refer to any of the pre-existing book canon before deciding on the story. Marty explained this in an interview pretty recently, but basically said that they wanted to tell a story without being confined to pre-existing lore from outside the games. His overall point was that the series was meant to be enjoyed without having to refer to external media to understand it, and in comparison to what Halo 5 is I can definitely agree.
I guess they've restarted Infinite from scratch. It might become the most expensive Halo game but it's the right thing to do now that Staten is handling it.
I'd say just wait for the Christmas sale and get it then. You don't really run into any 343i-induced bugs playing the campaigns, and getting it during Christmas will probably mean more people will play other multiplayer than H3/H4.
I'd say it's worth getting, yeah. 343 has done a lot of shitty things but somehow they actually did improve Halo 3's netcode and server browsers are apparently very close. They also fixed the Reach audio issues a little while back and fixed your custom emblem not showing up on Noble 6 during the campaign. The only lingering issues are graphical issues on the original Halo 2 graphics mode that they haven't bothered to fix (missing plants on Cairo Station, the sun being invisible for some reason) and of course Halo CE's original graphics being based on the Gearbox port. If you want pretty much every classic Halo campaign and multiplayer experience (mostly) working in one package, and decently populated, the MCC does have that, especially since they introduced crossplay in the recent patch.