: I have different control schemes for every Halo, and though it was funny how
: grenades switched button on me literally every single Halo game (Boxer
: pains), it never took me long to adapt to it, because I just saw it as a
: different game.

Well congratulations. You can easily adapt to things. Last I checked, though, you and I are not the same person. I used default controls in Halo 1, 2, & 3, and then Recon in Reach, Halo 4, and Halo 5, and "The Duke" in HCEA. I like things to be as close to those original default controls as possible. But even then there are slight changes that continued throwing me off for the longest time. After six years of pressing X to reload, having reload go to RB and X becoming the deploy equipment button, I kept having to remind myself not to press X to reload anymore, yet I still kept making that mistake, and if I went back to Halo 1 or 2 ever, I'd end up making the same mistake. In fact, I slip up fairly often in Halo 3 in the MCC. Recon in Reach was pretty close to Halo 3 default, though, but the tweaks made in Halo 4 threw me off for a long time. Those are all just changes to the position of a single button. Or to use a non-Halo game as an example, when Capcom released the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the GameCube, they switched the roles of B and A; on the NES, B was shoot and A was jump, but on the GameCube B was jump and A was shoot. I continually screwed up for days if not weeks, and even after I started to get the hang of it it was still a constant conscious effort to keep myself from reverting back to doing things how I did them for the 16 years prior to the Anniversary Collection, and I was never as proficient as I was with the original NES games.

Muscle memory is such a huge problem with me. Once I've spent a long enough time doing things a certain way, my body just does these tasks automatically without me having to really put much conscious thought into it. When we shuffled some stuff around in the cabinets when my roommate got some new dishes about a month ago, I kept reflexively reaching for where the dishes used to be, and I still slip up even now. I had the same problem when we got a new fridge and I kept reaching for things that were no longer there because it was a different design. Same for when I got my first automatic transmission vehicle; after a decade of driving stick, I found myself habitually reaching for a clutch pedal and gear shift that didn't exist. Those are far more simplistic things than having to undo everything I've learned about a control scheme that involves four buttons, two triggers, two bumpers, and a D-pad that covers four functions, to say nothing about how objects are manipulated.

If you can adapt to new things quickly, well, good for you. But I'm not you. It's not possible for me to "Git gud" in any reasonable amount of time. It may take me weeks if not months of practice to get use to these new controls. As I get older my patience wears thin ever more quickly, and I have neither the inclination nor the patience to invest that much time just to learn and entirely new control scheme. It would be like trying to learn to ride a reverse bicycle or to type on a Dvorak keyboard.

: Forge is the same way. I look at it as a map editor, rather than as the
: monitor that we floated about and spawned things with.

And I look at it as Forge, because that's the only map editor I really used extensively. Aside from some tinkering around in the Far Cry map editors (which I found extremely ungainly), I honestly have no other frame of reference besides "The bumpers move up and down, A selects objects, Y deletes objects, X brings up the menu, et cetera."

: It took me all of
: ten minutes to completely adapt to the new controls, and in order to test
: it out, I decided to remake a Black Ops 3 map that I had just played on
: minutes before. It took me all of five hours to learn he controls and make
: this

Again, I'm not you. So it took you ten minutes to adapt. And? I spent an entire hour in Forge trying futilely to get a grasp on the new controls. I managed to get like seven blocks and some spawn points before I gave up in frustration. I simply cannot unlearn five years of reflexive habit at the drop of a hat.

: I only made a few maps in Reach, because it took me 25+ hours of work to get
: my Loading Bay map to a level where I was happy with it, given all of the
: limitations and sacrifices that I had to make, while constantly having to
: correct mistakes and nudging each piece one by one a lot.

Honestly, magnets alone solved 99% of the tedium involved with aligning things in Forge. The controls were always perfectly fine to me. Having no prior frame of reference and thus no muscle memory to override, I quickly learned the controls for Forge. Placing objects in Halo 3 was rather ungainly, but the coordinate system and other improvements in Reach made creating things in Forge relatively easy for me. Placing and moving objects never felt like a chore. The extra tools in Halo 4 (magnets, locking, & duplication) improved things even more. In H2A, I was able to recreate most of an old Halo 4 map I made in extremely short order. Most of the time I spent in Forge was simply thinking of what to make and then making sure it plays well, not moving the pieces around.

: The new controls are highly intuitive and vastly superior to previous Forge
: tools, and are one of the highlights of Halo 5 for me. And remember that
: they were made with the help of real Forgers, not chumps like you and I.
: They were clearly happier with them this way. I really don't see what the
: issue is with them, although I wouldn't be against them adding control
: schemes for convenience.

Intuitive to you. Superior to you. And I don't give a shit what the big-name Forgers think. If they think that everyone should have to just up and learn an entirely new control scheme just because they found the old one sub-optimal, well, fuck them. Did no one at 343i even stop to think to themselves "Hey. There might be thousands of Forgers that would prefer the old controls. We should maybe add an option for classic controls"? Obviously not.

Until they add classic-style controls, them I'm not bothering with Halo 5's Forge, I don't care how many other improvements they made. It's crap like this that makes me feel like I wasted my money buying Halo 5. The more time goes by, the less good I see in this game. From my perspective, every time 343i makes one step forward, they take two steps back. All the changes they ever make just seem to add up to a net negative. I get excited to use a Forge with an expanded item set only to find that I'm fumbling with the controls like a drunkard trying to play Jenga. I'm not going to put up with it anymore. I got half a mind just to sell the game to recoup some of my money and be done with it. I haven't played Halo 5 outside of Customs Night in over two weeks. The game is a constant source of aggravation. The campaign is the only remotely consistently good thing about it. 343i may have lots of great ideas, but holy crap do they execute them in ways that drive me up the damn wall.