Do people really struggle that hard with killing people before they get away? Like holy shit it isn't that hard. I don't really understand the complaints with map design either, he talks about a bunch of different sight lines, and with the exception of Regret I don't believe any of the maps really have sight line issues. (Regret is too swiss cheese, imo.) Kill cams, completely agree, need to be optional at the least. Honestly, sprint really isn't that big of a deal. I very rarely find myself sprinting in h5.
Also this line "Why did the battle rifle become the weapon to define Halo's competitive scene? Because Halo felt good when a player knew his shots hit" was funny to me, considering hit detection in h2 and h3 was pretty bad at times (especially considering my less than average internet at the time).
"How can 343 Industries showcase the strength of the Halo 5 by showing us maps where the bare minimum of effort was applied to their creation?" Really? We haven't even seen how many maps there will be in the game yet and we're already complaining about the remix process? Seriously, the ideal of good design for computer science resonates with good reuse of assets. Regret and truth, eden and empire play significantly different from each other. "Oh, but think of the prospect of playing identical maps with swapped textures, changed lighting, and this box sitting here instead of sitting over there. How exciting!" .... Yea that's the only difference let me tell ya.
Average time to kill is not that much lower than other games IMO, but I would actually like to see some hard numbers on this before I make a judgement call. Honestly, decreasing bullet magnetism would go a long way here, cause there really isn't much auto aim which I very much like.
I definitely agree about teammate indicators and friendly fire. Friendly fire must absolutely be a part of competitive game modes. The ranking system isn't really that bad either, with numbers tweaks i could see it being quite good if it matched more consistently with same ranks. When playing alone, Ill occasionally see some onyx and below, but it's usually just semi-pro and pros.
There's too much damn bloat in this essay, honestly it felt kind of like a chore to read.