The biggest weakness of the Kilo 5 Trilogy and Halo 4 is that they implicitly state that the Covenant fell into complete shambles over a period of three months. By the time you see the Arbiter and Hood at the Voi memorial, it's already over. Fleets have been shattered. Worlds have been burned. Engineers have suffered a gratuitous total existence failure. And none of it is ever going to get visited.

And that's not the worst bit. Apparently, none of it spilled over to Human space. We've got front-row seats to the purple-and-silver-kerfuffle, but no Brute ships stop by to finish the Prophets' work, and no Elites send a flotilla to press-gang humans into the war.

An empire's fall is a terrible thing to behold and it could have been a gold mine for great stories. The power plays between different factions. The unification for one final apocalyptic war against the Brutes. The Return hinted at such a situation in the decade following Halo 3, and it was damn interesting.

: To me, it makes sense as
: it really points to the prophets being in complete control of the Covenant
: for so long that now that they've been dethroned, everyone is in utter
: choas. The unggoy are semi-naive and stupid and the kig-yar species went
: immediately back to their pirating/gun-for-hire ways.

Really? It completely wrecks my suspension of disbelief.

These are Prophets, a race with a population so low, their gene pool only has a wading section.
Now try and imagine a Prophet running a food processing plant. Or a repair shop for farm machinery. Or a foundry. How about a soap factory?

The Writ of Union states that the Prophets are the religious leaders, and the Elites are the military leaders. In between those two spheres of influence is the massive economic and industrial complex needed to sustain an empire. But everyone seems to have flanderized both species until the Prophets are all scheming manipulators who control everything, and the Elites are vicious rubes who only know how to fight. Unless they pretend that economic sector doesn't exist, and the Covenant exists solely to fight. That last one is like assuming everyone in Nazi Germany was either a soldier, party official, or a slave in a munitions factory.

If all that Elites know is how to fight, then what were they doing in the 5,000 years of the Covenant when there was no all-consuming war? Sitting on their hands? Maybe there was usually some rebellion that needed putting down, but that couldn't have always occupied all of the Elites of fighting age. And what are the females doing? Are they running the keeps and managing land, or are they just pining for their missing men?

Maybe the Prophets absorbed more of the economic sector during the war as more Elites died and more material was devoted to the war. But there ought to be some sort of institutional knowledge and infrastructure that the Elites can draw upon.

So, I can buy the Covenant Separatists being brought low by infighting, a species-wide identity crisis, and a cataclysmic economic collapse. But Elites standing around looking at farm equipment and asking each other "How i mine fish?" is a joke. Literally, a joke. It would be fine in a comedy, but as a serious development in a science fiction franchise, it's painfully one-dimensional.

: The elites on the other hand, possibly the most obvious 'threat' to humanity'
: from the Covenant, are trying to find themselves after being the
: intelligent, lethal arm of the Covenant/prophets for so long...not to
: mention first being usurped by the brutes in leadership roles by the
: prophets, realizing their trusted leaders lied to them all along, teaming
: up with humanity who very recently was their enemy and an affront to their
: religious deities and then being out on their own again as a species after
: being in the Covenant for thousands of years or MANY generations of
: sangheili.

The problem with the Prophets-run-everything Covenant is that I can't see how such a society could have lasted for five thousand years.

: Add in the human subversion of the sangheili civil war all in
: the matter of a few years, and it would be pretty good reason for such a
: quick (and for most part easy) transition within the confused confines of
: the Halo universe.

No. Just no.
An empire that expanded for five thousand years should take much longer than three months to completely collapse. And if that same empire had been waging war against Humanity for twenty five years, the UNSC shouldn't have come out unscathed.

: As for Palmer, did you all not feel that the Epilogue cutscene for SpOps
: season 1 painted her in a bad light after her "argument" with
: Lasky?

Maybe I'm the expert on baby-eating antiheroes that I think I am, but no. I never picked that up.

: Just some thoughts...I really wish we could all sit down at a coffee shop and
: talk Halo universe sometime. I don't have the patience to type out
: everything I want to. These explanations and thoughts are always much
: better in my head. :)

I'd like that. I hope we can make it happen one day.