Alternately, they are simply doing their best to respond to community feedback
Which community? The Reach community, or the Halo 2 community? The community wants them to actually at least pretend they care about the Halo 3 players and update the playlists. I didn't quite hear people clamoring to be able to fire the DMR at full speed with zero bloom.
I'm a cynical bastard, but I really think that's what they are doing. The month after CEA hit (a few weeks, really), they're already rolling changes into other playlists. Could they be more aggressive? Sure.
TU's been out longer than that. The only new element was the Halo 1 pistol which was blatantly held back for market timing purposes. I know Google has diminished the meaning of how long a beta should last, but they need to make decisions at some point.
I also think the direction the changes lean will point to where Halo 4 is going. Which is a pretty good thing. This is distinct from using Reach as a Halo 4 test bed, which is a pretty silly comment. The Halo 4 test bed is their Halo 4 testing; they don't have nearly the options to tinker with Reach like that.
A game designed around bloom and no bleedthrough suddenly gets gametypes where bloom is removed and bleedthrough comes with the full package whether we like it or not. This is called "343 is fishing for opinions on what to do with these elements for Halo 4".
Maybe, just maybe, they're just doing their best to respond to to their community and to try and do right by them.
They are trying to do right by the community, but they're trying to be the cool uncle and please all the communities at the same time which just ends up with half baked, half finished implementations of Halo 2 worship forcibly grafted onto Reach post-ship when they could have had the full classic suite in Halo 4 since Halo 4 is not pressed to discs yet.
(You know how successful I think they're being. But that doesn't mean I don't notice 343 is at least trying. Look at the cards they've been dealt.)
They were dealt a 95% functional pre-made game where the previous developer had kept the community warmed up with monthly new gametypes, playlists, super jackpot weekends, and better support for maps they didn't even make (Defiant) than 343 has shown. Since they have taken over we have gotten no new gametypes, a title update that fixed no bugs and actually added new ones, more multiplayer achievements that disrupt the play of the game, and a complete burial (to borrow a wrestling term) of the Noble Map Pack. At least when something didn't work out under the Bungie era, they just went "well, that didn't work out" and deleted the element that didn't work where possible. Armor lock didn't work out? Delete it. The TU addresses none of the problems with Armor Lock, it still acts as a "pause" button to borrow some people's opinion of it. It was a change for the sake of a change to make people feel like 343 was doing something, and we still have the extremely overpowered Evade escape completely untouched and present in gametypes where it doesn't belong.
They acknowledge the banshee is overpowered and broken and "out of scope" of the 1.1 TU and CONTINUE to put it on new maps! When certain equipment didn't work out for Halo 3, you didn't see Bungie continue to try to include it on DLC maps, those pieces of equipment were just straight up never included in the new base variants of those maps. I don't know why we're being forced to deal with banshee rampages on Breakneck for yet another month when The Community has near unanimously said they don't want it on maps in it's broken state. You would have figured someone would have paid attention to the reaction from the default Highlands weapon timers and configuration. It's like everyone at 343 has forgotten that the Banshee was removed from Headlong in Halo 2 matchmaking for solid reasons, and even in the rare gametypes that it was present in, it was also 1/10th as powerful as it is in Reach.
I understand the legal wills involved, but out of the 5 companies involved in Halo: Anniversary, the 3 that did the majority of the work did not have their logos included in the bootup of the game. Even if lawyers could not see eye to eye on Bungie being there, at least Certain Affinity and Saber should have gotten top billing. It's not like it's beyond Microsoft either, as Gearbox was in the bootup for Halo PC and 4J is in the bootup for Perfect Dark. As it stands, 343 and Microsoft are just using the table that Bungie set with a bunch of different dishes that they made to set on that table, and are now reheating content from the Bungie freezer in order to build up their brand name with the Halo playerbase.
As it is, unless we see any new Megalo gametypes by February, I remain unconvinced that anything beyond a holding pattern for Halo 4 is in store for Reach beyond that point, and the Community Cartographers are to be used as anything but "well, at least we tried" attempt at community content integration post-takeover. Please tell me that anyone beyond the TU programmer at 343 actually knows how to make Megalo gametypes. Instead of implementing hooks to sell us Windows 7 Phones via ATLAS, implement hooks so that we can make Megalo gametypes via XNA. Create a new position and put someone on it who's title is "Legacy Halo Title Support Lead" and give them a small support team and a red phone to Bungie's engineers, and this person's entire job is to support and update Halo 3 and Reach when 4 takes over. (and then 4 when 5 takes over, etc) Those people paid just as much money for 3 as they did for Reach and 4, and they're paying just as much for Live as the Reach players are and the 4 players will be. They're still paying for DLC, too.
I drop the subject for now since it probably seems like I'm just piling on after the reaction to the Bulletin, but both Microsoft and 343 could do much better. Microsoft could actually throw the money behind their main franchise and 343 would do well to actually commit to futzing around with another developer's shipped and finished game.