I was late to the party with this game, just played through it in December / January. I remember letting the credits roll and being really surprised at the metric ton of names that were attributed to outsourced studios. And now after watching the ten minute vid in the OP, along with another thirteen minute video on the same channel, it is really crazy to see how obsessed MS was with eighteen months contracts, even for people showing up to work in Redmond.
I get why they did this - tax incentives. The mystery to me is why it was done on an installment of what was, pre acquisition spree, their top property. They have as much or more money to spend as anyone. If they would so this on Halo, what makes any other franchise under their umbrella safe from this?
That said, despite the mess this game was in terms of development, it ended up being an 8/10 game for me, somewhat coincidentally like BioShock Infinite, another well documented "development hell" situation.
HVTs, Banished Outposts, and liberating FOBS was fun. But there also some serious issues: not allowing players to fast travel to next available story mission unless they had already been there was super weird. Even ODST only did this for half of a campaign with the found objects - Infinite basically did this for the whole game. I know on replay of ODST on higher difficulty you can just pick the missions from a menu and skip the city - I'd hope Infinite is similar in replaying missions, cannot say for sure. They could have had Echo 216 dropping you off with the Pelican at other, one off locations on Zeta Halo. A snowy weather mission, a jungle mission, etc. Instead everything, side or story mission, takes place on the same section of the ring. A lot of the story missions were bad. Gondola rides shooting down sentinels are bad design. "House of Reckoning" was basically no design - if it turned that level was AI generated, I would not be surprised.
Friendly AI was another weird issue. They don't drive you anywhere. GTA IV, circa 2008, had taxi AI that could take you anywhere. Terrain made driving to certain elevated positions to start a mission too slow - I would constantly abandon a Warthog or Razorback full of allies to just grapple shot up the side of a mountain (although I did get the achievement for bringing rescued AI into a story mission). Got the "highest elevation" achievement using the grapple shot. Takes too long with the valor points to unlock a flight vehicle. Scorpion tanks cannot roll over trees the width of a baseball bat.
The open world can work fine, they just need to fix some drastically obvious mistakes. Something resembling a plot that actually connect to the previous wouldn't hurt either. Very weird handling of this IP.