The multiplayer-lovers got what they wanted; a patch for Halo 2 multiplayer. The singleplayer-lovers got a short, incoherent campaign nowhere near as fun or innovative as Halo 2's. Multiplayer was clearly the focus, and that's ****ing bull****. You'll have to forgive me to expect Bungie to at the very least maintain the quality of Halo's singleplayer, rather than compromising it to put a hell of a lot more effort into multiplayer.
I think you're off you're rocker, personally, since Halo 2's campaign was by general consensus at the time a badly nerfed version of the first game; they made a vast array of silly and stupid changes to what they brought from the first game, meaning that it could never capture the feel of Halo 1 because that would have been impossible for the player to survive. They did, I admit, draw a wrong conclusion by eliminating the Arbiter storyline, but it was a collateral casuality from undoing the stupidities introduced in Halo 2. Not
everything about 2 was bad; making something without redeeming virtue is difficult. Still, as a collateral casuality, it was acceptable.
Halo 3 was closer to the original, close enough to definitely have some of its feel, but it was also its own game and marched to its own tune. And it was better than its predecessors in most if not all ways. I can only think of one thing that seriously annoyed me about it. Halo 2 had a long list.