I was okay to read some of your incredibly stupid criticisms (especially where you use straight up hyperbole to fabricate a basis for your argument) but come on with this shit:

However it seems a lot of people really hate the idea of an objective marker, but the fact is if the player does get lost or unable to figure out something (for instance when you have to go under the bridge, or when you are driving a car and don't realize a certain jump is possible, or as I mentioned before, finding a single lever while enemies are infinitely spawning) the player is completely lost. The game doesn't hint or even nudge the player in the right direction, it's either sink or swim in those cases, and that's frustrating if you missed something the first time around.

There's no objective marker in the game. So if you save your game, come back in six monthes, or worse if you're stuck and don't know which way to go (Ravenholm did this to me) you can wander around for twenty minutes because you didn't see a single switch in a large area.

This is quite possibly the single dumbest criticism of HL2 I have ever seen or heard in my entire life. The developers themselves explain the concepts they utilized in their application of level design and the basic idea is that you shape the maps in a way that suggests the path without holding the player's hand. And it works. (I don't even get how the fuck you can get lost in Ravenholm. That section of the game has legitimate criticisms, such as the respawning enemies but this one you're levying is just nonsense.)

Half-Life 2 still features the single most intuitive, open-feeling yet still completely linear map design ever created in a video game.

If you worked on Guerilla, it might explain a lot about your ideas of how things should function in game design. The original Red Faction was a shoddy attempt at becoming a serial replacement for Half-Life (AKA "We're better than anything Half-Life 2 could ever be, gaiz! For realz!"). But the problem is that Volition is really, really, really astonishingly bad at level design and the only thing they could ultimately figure out was tunnels and hallways. In a game where the suggested style of play was to destroy the environment and make your own routes. You really couldn't actually do that in Red Faction and the most "exploration" you got out of the destructible environments was finding ammo caches in obvious places...that were no better than smashing a random vent to drop into a room full of crates in Half-Life 1. Didn't help that the overall story of Red Faction featured zero iconic, likable, or interesting characters. I mean, we've got BUTCH HARDCOCK or whatever the name of the protagonist was...that kisses the girl at the end of the story even though they've had about 7½ seconds of interaction. Gordon didn't say a damn thing throughout HL1 and was given more characterization as a result of that than our friend BUTCH HARDCOCK ever generated with his running train of stupid commentary throughout the game.

So how did Volition respond to that? They created Red Faction 2, a game nobody played, then went on to create Guerilla because creating an interesting story with a lot of complex narrative structure is actually kind of hard. So let's just build a mediocre sandbox! So no, I'm not going to consider your legacy some type of infallible study of perfection for why you think HL2 isn't a good game.