: Nevertheless it is a fact that it was Bungie's intent that Humans ==
: Forerunners.

: How you feel about it is irrelevant except as a study on how our feelings
: cloud our judgement on things that should be obvious.

: I used to take on these objections, point by point, to show that they were
: weak and to contrast them with the obvious things in the story that
: strongly suggested that F==H but, really, there is no point. Read this
: post . Evil Otto is Dave Candland a Bungie employee.

In addition to Candland's quote and Guilty Spark's subtle and not-so-subtle hints in the first trilogy, there was also pages 274-278 of Contact Harvest, which made it explicit. Mendicant Bias proclaimed to the Prophets when speaking of the symbol the Covenant though represented Forerunner artifacts: "FOR EONS I HAVE WATCHED. LISTENED TO YOU MISINTERPRET. THIS IS NOT RECLAMATION. THIS IS RECLAIMER. AND THOSE IT REPRESENTS ARE MY MAKERS. I WILL REJECT MY BIAS AND WILL MAKE AMENDS. MY MAKERS ARE MY MASTERS. I WILL BRING THEM SAFELY TO THE ARK." This chapter laid clear the motivations of the Covenant's attempted genocide of the human race: a Forerunner Monitor told them that the humans were Forerunners, a revelation that the prophets feared would have unraveled the entire Covenant.

By making humans and Forerunners a separate species, 343I diminishes this aspect of the story. Truth, Mercy, and Regret are no longer committing what would to their religion be deicide, but are now simply exterminating a species that the Forerunners didn't even like and that a single Forerunner supported. In the context of 343I's vision for the Halo-verse, humans were targeted for extermination based on bad communication from an AI. It makes the UNSC-Covenant war seem far less epic in its importance. Post-war, humans are no longer reclaiming a lost legacy from an Atlantean-like human civilization that destroyed itself 100,000 years, but is now supposed to be assuming the Mantle initially granted to it by the Precursors (who became the Flood) back when we were still primitive quadrupedal apes.

Retconning the Forerunners to be a separate alien species hurt the series' fiction. No two ways about it.