The design decisions we've always disagreed on. The features (Theater, Firefight, etc) I really do think can be attributed to time issues. I don't think this development went smoothly. I think they may have tried to implement Firefight but struggled with it, and couldn't afford to spend more time on it if they wanted to ship, so they cut it. Same with a lot of missing features. Makes sense when you think about how they came out upon launch and said "we are really looking at adding full features in through patches, not just fixes."
Doesn't this argue my point, though?
Firefight was cut because 343 dedicated their resources to Spartan Ops. That's their overriding decision that affected feature inclusion in this respect more than time constraints. That's a gutsy decision, and one I praised them for
pre-release, when Spartan Ops sounded like the sort of paradigm shifting addition you'd expect from a new Halo game, given what we've been used to from Bungie.
I wanted Spartan Ops to change our perceptions of co-operative gaming, as well as content distribution. The idea of an evolving, weekly story is something that I was very interested in, especially after how much enjoyment I've received from The Walking Dead. The caveat being that the experience has to be compelling enough to push me from week to week, to make me care, to have me invested in the plot line and the characters.
And then I saw some videos and a few fears began to sprout. Then I played the game and they blossomed. Spartan Ops is nothing more than minor combat scenarios stitched together with trite narrative devices like button pressing, and pelican evacuation. It's not an evolving narrative, no matter how many radio voice overs imply otherwise, or how many nav points feign some overarching objective. The narrative meat is separate from the gameplay, relegated to CG cutscenes, of which again don't tell a particularly engaging story with characters that people have consistently disliked (Palmer).
I don't take any pleasure in this, these are just my honest thoughts. Forget time constraints, Firefight was thrown onto the chopping block for this, and given its execution I hope for Halo 5 that it's the other way around.