: In other words - people who never paid attention to Star Trek or who have the
: attention span of goldfish.

To be fair, in TOS he never acted like anything tragic or any great loss had just happened (unless it's in the 30-40% of episodes I haven't seen >_>).

: Threat level red shifted into the microwave background and hence only
: observable as easily corrected comms static. Cortana took care of that
: threat so we wouldn't have to.

I like the way you mixed that metaphor. At the end of the game (the end of Composer and all of Midnight, and I don't know how I remembered those names right away), he felt like a threat to humanity to me, but not before that. Before that he did throw the Chief around like a ragdoll without even touching him, but it's kind of assumed he'll live, so it's all just "oh, that looks like it hurt... good thing it wasn't me".

: According to Silentium: the Flood turned him into a Dick - shades of
: Indoctrination. So now we know, X months after the game came out. We
: fought the Dick Didact.

I knew that the first time around.

: I hate losing more than I like winning. Tinkering with the story wont change
: that.

That sounds like the kind of thing that'll make you enjoy everything less, not just multiplayer. :/

: Was happy with them being separate storyverses. Was even happy with mp having
: no story.

I was fine with how it was too. To be clear, my view of how it was was that all or almost all of the maps were real places, and almost all of the in-game descriptions were more or less correct, but everything else was strictly for gameplay. I would've been OK with them taking the Reach route of having all the maps be pre-defined places, even.