They sold a $60 product that didn't even come close to functioning as you'd reasonably expect, and which you'd be lucky to be able to get a refund for.

If it was just a little broken, that would be one thing. But the main draw of the game for a lot of people was literally not playable at launch.

Their fanbase is already disgruntled after Halo 4, and MCC (which was supposed to pull those people back to Xbox) wound up pissing a lot of people off. Trying to salvage their relationship with their old fanbase makes sense, and giving out free content is an entirely reasonable token of goodwill. (Which is why Ubisoft and Evolution have done the same thing recently after similarly releasing products that didn't work very well.)

: It was unfortunate that matchmaking didn't work right away, but 343 said they
: would fix it, and they did.

It's a work in progress; it's great compared to what it was, and they've been improving things, but based on my experiences last night the game is still very broken. There are still occasional matchmaking failures, parties still get put on opposite teams, parties still get randomly broken up, etc.