I remember people hated on Reach because it didn't follow Chief and they added all the gadgets, then people hated 4 because of the weird undersuit Chief wore and a bunch of other nitpicks. Infinite has been hated for a slew of other reasons, but now Reach is considered good and 4 has a rising reputation. It seems to me that PvP players and story players have two extremely different outlooks on where the games went wrong, but at least we agree on one thing - keeping 5/Guardians on Xbox only was stupid (I still haven't played it).
I really would have liked Halo games based on idTech though. I can't see why idTech can't be a complete package for Halo, especially 7 and 8.
Firing a bunch of id staff probably crushes that idea more than it was previously though.