: Not to say 343 doesn't share responsibility for bad Halo products, but I
: think a lot of the problems with the production are probably more related
: to Ridley Scott's team, and 343's issue was with oversight.

Oversight is a pretty common problem with 343i's output. They either don't have much in the way of quality control over their own products, or they're absolute rubbish at recognizing quality or the lack thereof (also evidenced by the way they hired some Marvel C-lister as their lead writer). Or they simply don't care, knowing that there's always people who will buy their stuff either way.

Nightfall is a very baffling case because of the scale and scope of the project in that it somehow managed to turn out worse than some of the comics (except Initiation and Escalation's Didact arc). One can justify auxiliary media like the comics being mostly subpar and at worst terrible, but a relatively big investment like Nightfall missing its mark so badly is very alarming to say the least. You would've expected them to learn their lesson from the Traviss disaster and keep a closer eye on material released under the Halo brand.

But then the "expanded universe" fanbase, especially the vocal part thereof, is a very marginal minority and 343i seems to treat them as such; it seems that only the competitive MP-playing fans get acknowledged nowadays.