I'm having a hard time imagining which is worse:

1) 343 knows that the game isn't working well/hardly at all, but decides that it's acceptable to ship it anyway. Hey, they can patch it later, and even though they've hyped it as much as we have, it's more important to get it out there and into the hands of players because they've already preordered anyway, right?

2) 343 has absolutely no idea how bad and broken the systems are; a company with the primary goal of shipping a AAA video game that has failed so absolutely in their quality control that they are truly and honestly unaware of the state of the title.