: Then the entire campaign goes around where all Chief and Cortana talk about
: is Halsey. Didacts? Requiems? Infinitys? Laskys? Vampires? Nope, no real
: questions asked there or much concern about anything. All about finding
: Halsey. It's tragic in a way, you know?

Yeah... did you not think that was intentional?

: There's this love here, and they know they need to find Halsey to save Cortana,
: but there's also this threat to humanity that's been awakened. Duty before love?
: Stop the Didact and maybe still find Halsey? Nope. It was never, ever intended.

What were you expecting, a happy ending? Personally I wanted one, but I wasn't expecting one.

: Halsey never so much as makes an appearance, and there wasn't even the
: possibility of them ever finding her. It's so clear that the writers never
: intended it that's unbelievable that they'd start the game out with
: Halsey. She's basically the premise of the entire story and the first
: thing we see in the game, but she's then immediately dropped as any sort
: of possibility or plot point beyond Chief and Cortana going on and on
: about her.

Did you find the two logs of hers? It also looks like they intended to bring her in in Spartan Ops, so that would be just a story choice.

: So okay, 343 messed up. But wait, there's Halsey in Spartan Ops. And, spoiler
: alert for Spartan Ops right here, Halsey finally finds out that Master
: Chief is alive! Oh boy she is not happy that this was kept from her. Now,
: plenty of stuff went down, she gets yanked off the ship, she gets shot,
: craziness ensues. Yes. But that entire bit with the Master Chief is again
: completely dropped, but this time from Halsey's side of the story! Sure,
: there's a season 2. Or a Halo 5. Whatever. But for Halo 4's plot and
: purposes, the entire premise with Halsey and Chief has been completely
: dropped and thrown in for no reason because it has gone nowhere. The
: impact is thus never truly felt. They don't so much as see Halsey, and she
: doesn't so much as see them.

I don't particularly like the lack of closure on that front, and I agree with where I think you're coming from, which is that it should work as a self-contained story, but sometimes it's OK to just set the table (and they did more than that, at least as far as Cortana).

: The next question is, do they turn Halsey into a petty idiot bent on revenge,
: completely warping and changing her character from what we've known her as
: after all she's been through and done just because she lost an arm and a
: single Spartan went out to kill her (who already showed plenty of
: hostility and contempt to begin with).

I thought the overview of episode 10 in the bulletin a little while back was interesting for a bunch of reasons. One of those is that the person who wrote it wanted to give the audience the idea that Halsey had big things in mind as far as the humans who were against her. What interested me more than that was the reasoning for it: to make people question it instead of just assume she meant Palmer and company. I don't know where that will lead, but I appreciate them at least trying to keep us guessing.

: Tl;dr, the handling of Halsey in relation to Master Chief/Cortana was
: completely botched and lessened the entire impact and point of the story
: and half of its dialogue (between Chief and Cortana) since the writers
: clearly never intended for it to even be a possibility for Halsey to
: appear.

please see above in this post and a bunch of threads when the game came out, re: tragedy