I honestly didn't think that the story of 4 was bad (outside of the QTE fight at the very end), and I enjoyed the character growth in Infinite. If you jump from 3 to Infinite then you'll probably hate Chief, but the way he's gradually been forced to accept his humanity has actually made him more interesting to me. He's definitely not the original character he was intended to be (he kept his helmet on so that anybody could imagine themself inside the suit) and I think a lot of original fans are mad at that.

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).