1. There are still playlists for that arean style play, so little to argue about here in my opinion.
2. That roll the dice mechanic actually still exists in the arena version too. Once the spawns are picked up and the first battles are out of the way your next encounter is very much chance and team communication about who, where, what etc. To me all loadouts do is speed this process up, to me it's evolutionary rather than revolutionary here and helps remove having to run, time or camp around fixed weapon spawns that can be farmed even.
3. I disagree, Reach was evolutionary. Look at the facts; very similar vehicles, weapons, strafe, jump, teamwork, map flows, choke points, power weapons not in loadouts, gametypes, playlists etc etc. In the end you may think arena vs. progression is vastly different but when you look at the evolution from CE, 2, 3 & Reach you can clearly see it as an iterative process and not a complete revolution.
1. There is a single playlist that kinda, sorta, mimics the core of what Halo was. In this playlist you do not have radar and you still get to choose your starting weapon. We have yet to see how spawning works in Slayer Pro, but this isn't a simple evolutionary step past the history of Halo; this is an attempt to shoehorn nostalgia (or "competition") into a product that has already moved on.
2*. The roll the dice mechanic is much more prevalent in a class based (loadout) scenario. For instance, in Reach, against a team of jetpackers or a team of armor lock users (before the TU) there is typically a single outcome. Either you switch your loadout to mirror theirs, or you lose. This will most likely become apparent in Halo 4 (just as it is prevalent in BF3 or COD). Granted there will be some players who consistently just pick what they prefer, what they have nostalgia for, or what they want 100% of the time. Then there will be a set of players who are forced to change their loadout/spawn setup after matches begin to effectively counter the opposition loadouts. The mere fact that there are loadouts in Halo is revolutionary for the franchise (not for gaming in general, just for Halo).
3. Agree to disagree. In my opinion any game that is an arena shooter is completely different than a class based loadout system. They are related in the same way that dogs and cats are both domesticated pets that live with people. Yes you can argue all day that dogs and cats are very similar and look at all of these same/similar characteristics, but at the end of the day you have arena shooter vs class based shooter. In my opinion one is more balanced and fair. One is also more "Halo."
2. That roll the dice mechanic actually still exists in the arena version too. Once the spawns are picked up and the first battles are out of the way your next encounter is very much chance and team communication about who, where, what etc.
* To me this is the beauty of what Halo used to be. Yes the first bits of battle and the last moments of a match often devolved into scripted scenarios. The middle was the sticky part that required teamwork, communication, and skill. In many ways this parallels the way that chess is competitively played. Once an opening is chosen by a player there is generally a very technical counter to that open. After the first 7-13 moves the match gets interesting and becomes skill based until very close to the end when one player clearly has victory in their sights and it quickly concludes.
With loadouts, global ordnance, kill streaks, instant respawn, and random spawning all over the map it feels like, to me, that midway through a match the rules have changed. It would be like playing chess and suddenly your rook or knight moves differently due to an unforeseen and entirely unpredictable metric that arbitrarily changes the board throughout the match. This doesn't mean that Halo 4 is a failure, or that we all won't play copious amounts of it over the next month (or year or years), but it does mean that Halo 4 has moved ever farther away from what used to differentiate Halo from the rest of the shooters.