From this, I can only conclude that you haven't been reading my posts for the last two years.
That hurts, man. That really hurts.

: With the II's, the armour was costly,
: rare, and highly advanced. There's almost no sense for that in the IV's -
: with 'red shirt' IV's dying everywhere, then what, is the armor cheap and
: expendable? Or do they actually care heavily about the loss incurred, not
: only with the individual (not as significant now as with the II's and
: III's) but also with the specialized armor?

If Gen II was as good as the original, why haven't we seen attempts to destroy the armor when it's in danger of falling into the hands of the Covenant? You come across the bodies of dead Spartan IVs, but they're of zero importance. Contrast First Strike, where Blue Team made sure to make Grace's armor self-destruct when they couldn't take it with them.

Oh, that's right. Lone Wolf.

: It used to be that the Spartan individual was a highly specialized and
: trained human, put together - because they were the only ones who could
: handle it - with a very expensive and highly advanced suit of specialized
: armor.

Correction: They were in a very expensive and highly advanced suit of generalized armor. MJOLNIR was a can-do will-do anything technological marvel that excelled in all combat situations. Then there were variants. Most were for applications that would require structural changes to the armor (EOD, CQB, EVA) or were made by other parties (Rogue was a privatized version, Hayubasa was a competing program/$500 toilet seat) or were probably non-canon (ODST, Security).

Now that Halo 4 and, to a lesser extent, Halo Reach have introduced a plethora of redundant armor sets (Halo 4 has three separate sets for tracking fugitives.) the base MJOLNIR seems pathetic. All it has are strength-enhancement and shields.