You're right about the lack of objective in the lists, and also about the dedicated playlist; slipped my mind. But other than that, I stand by my choices.
I found that Invasion worked pretty well within the Noble 6v6 playlist. Got voted for as often as not. Tbh the gametype has barely changed since launch except with the assault phase on Breakpoint, if I'm not mistaken. I understand anything in 4 digits is considered "popular" but...
All the playlists have decent numbers, where else are the cuts going to be made? Infection? I'd love to, but anything in 10,000 is almost sacred.
These are just my humble thoughts, in any case.
Does anyone remember what the typical population for a playlist was in H3's heyday, out of curiosity?
There are currently eight Slayer-only playlists in the rotation, with the Anniversary playlists being "heavily weighted towards Slayer". Ideally, I'd like to see them either shit or get off the pot with regards to the title update so this stupid split doesn't exist anymore. At that point, axe TS with Arena taking its place (I assume there's no way it would go away with the effort they put into the ranking system) and making Squad the go-to Slayer playlist, renaming it to Team Slayer. We know from experience that Team Hardcore playlists that screw with SWAT and Snipers don't work. Crank up DLC matching parameters as far as is reasonable so that there's no need for a dedicated DLC playlist. 6v6 playlists on maps and gametypes that aren't designed around them suck and having them show up more in the playlists that make sense is preferable if they're able to get that system to, you know, actually work.
The Infection problem is probably the most difficult one to solve. I think it could possibly be reduced by integrating it into Action Sack as a third-slot option (so that you can force the vote away from it more easily if you don't like it), but if that's what people like then at least they have a single destination to go for it. Properly incentivizing objective-heavy playlists would help their population issues - a permanent super jackpot for Objective could double its population.
They did mention that they're working on breathing new life into Invasion, so I don't know that I can suggest any changes to it without knowing what they are just yet.
Multi-Team is a complete joke, I don't really see a reason for it to be continued unless they
want a playlist where people go to farm kills and ignore the objective. Oh wait, they added Flag Slayer to Objective, so I guess they don't care too much.
The Halo 3 numbers were inflated in comparison to the more accurate Reach numbers, so making a judgement based on those is very difficult. Going through it point by point, there are some good ideas in your list, don't get me wrong. It's just a few that I take significant issue with. At this point, I don't know that there's an easy solution to any of the problems Reach's matchmaking has other than flipping the bird to some people and trying to make the best experience for the greatest number of people by cutting down the playlist bloat (...which in my eyes means the return of the weekend playlists, but the outrage would be incredible). On a certain level, it doesn't really make any sense to be dividing Slayer up by minute gametype differences on a playlist level when we can do it on a gametype level through the voting system (which desperately needs a revamp in the form of a separation between map and gametype selection).
