You might care because ODST wasn't a full Halo game, or at least not as full as Halo 4 (but then [insert theater rant here]).

Leviathan:
: Never really cared about that. I think we've gotten plenty of Halos in these
: games so far that the developers shouldn't feel the need to shoehorn them
: in in the future (I don't think they have been yet).

They didn't need to have the Composer near one-- that's a lot of the issue for me, it's right there but we don't get to go on it, and then it's gone.

CINCLesotho:
: As a lurker, I feel fine, great in fact. Exploring Requiem brought back a lot
: more memories of exploring the original Halo than, say, exploring Reach or
: New Mombasa (as cool as those might have been).

Well yeah, most of the places you go to in it look a lot more like places on Installation 04 than anything in New Mombasa or on Reach.

: Halo 3 barely featured a Halo anyway.

It featured one a heck of a lot more than Halo 4-- the Halo in that game was seen, mentioned, and hinted at in multiple levels, and you spent an entire level on it.

: To be quite frank, there is nothing necessarily more interesting about
: a Halo ring than say, a Shield World or the Ark.

To be frank, I disagree. Halos have a minimalism and simplicity about them that I like, and seeing the ground arc up and go above you, and around and back down... IDK, there's something about it. Requiem had that and in more dimensions, but only for one level, and it was harder to appreciate the beauty there.

: Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach are great games, and so is Halo 4. Further, if
: anything Requiem evokes the scale of the original Halo more than any
: mega-structure since the Ark.

There hasn't been any megastructure in Halo since the Ark (unless you count the glimpse of Installation 04 at the end of Reach and the few Halo-based multiplayer maps).

Grizzlei:
: Halo has matured to a state where we really don't need to step foot on or be
: in orbit of one ever again. I don't think we've ever really needed them
: to be frank. Star Wars is still what it is without grand space battles,

what, no it's not

: Battlestar Galactica still cherishes human drama when following the
: Cylons, and let's be honest, Stargate episodes focusing on gate
: malfunctions were dreadful.

I don't remember Stargate that well, but I remember liking an episode or two where the gate malfunctioned

: With that said, when appropriate, Halo installations still need to make a
: grand appearance every so often. Not like a simple port-of-call, but an
: event of great wonder, novelty, and circumstance.

Which seemed like what was happening when one showed up in Halo 4, but then they just shrugged it off.

speaking in general: they did have that room with artifacts from the nearby Halo, and that was cool, but that's no substitute for actually exploring one