No, it's the only way to tell a story like Star Wars and Star Trek. There's a difference.

: without having to deal with fundamental life concepts like the
: ability to communicate effectively brought on by complex physics concepts
: like space/time. Otherwise you have very lonely stories happening within
: their bubbles of feasible current-tech communication,

Halo was a story about a secretive alien conglomerate slowly, inexorably driving humanity to extinction. There's a definite element of fear-of-the-unknown, and a definite element of "Oh, shit, how does their technology do that?" A sense of loneliness and isolation only enhances that.

Let's think about the implications of lightspeed-only sensors and communication for the UNSC (I imagine that the Covenant has FTL communications, but not sensors) during the war.

When a Covenant ship jumps in-system and lands, say, four light-hours from a colony, it will be four hours before the image of that ship's arrival reaches the colony. That's four hours to slowly survey the opposition and watch outbound flights before the UNSC knows to start the evacuation. The images that the Covenant warship is seeing are four hours old as well (Younger or older, depending on which part of the system it is surveying) but that hardly matters for the Covenant's mission.

That's the suspense inherent to relativity. If you're operating a sensor station, there's a very real chance that the Covenant are already in-system, only you can't see them yet. In systems close to the front lines, all starships are strongly encouraged to exit on randomized vectors before continuing to their destination just on the off chance that a forward observer for the Covenant is present.

: If sci-fi is typically an analog for current human culture, then stretching
: that story across vast distances where communication takes longer very
: much affects the type of story you can tell. Find a way to way to
: communicate FTL, and you can tell an analog of a story that takes place in
: a village, but across the galaxy, and have no communication issues.

Then you're not telling science fiction. You're dressing up another genre in the trappings of science fiction.

: I wouldn't say it's a 'cop out' as it were; I mean why should that be a cop
: out, but not the physics or tech required for the size of some of those
: space ships, or weapon technology, or...?

It's not about Halo being hard sci-fi. It hasn't been, and I think that the term gets thrown around too much. What it's supposed to mean is that a story sticks to near-future technology and what we can explain with today's theoretical science.

But it's a label that gets hung on fiction that is clearly not bound by modern theories and engineering principles. Schlock Mercenary is an example; I've seen it called "Hard Sci-Fi" even though that term would make the writer burst into uncontrollable giggles. Hell, the visual aesthetic of the comic is a blend of Dr. Seuss and the Jetsons. We need a new term, one for a science fiction setting that bothers to think about the implications of its fictional technology. What gets the Hard Sci-Fi label applied to Schlock Mercenary (I'm going to keep plugging that webcomic to the day Howard Taylor finally misses an update) is that, yes, it follows through on the implications of its technology. The one hard and fast rule is that there is no technology that creates gravity. Instead:

-Gravity on starships is provided by redirecting the gravitational pull of a van-sized chunk of neutronium. -Tractor beams are merely the focused gravitational attraction of these same chunks of neutronium, and are powerful enough to serve as primary weapons until the advent of the teleporting torpedo.
-Shields are the very opposite, using gravitational gradients to redirect laser beams and bat away those pesky relativistic projectiles.
-The power to run a ship city comes from slowly, carefully annihilating small slivers of that neutronium. E=mc^2, right?

How does any of that work? Hell if anyone knows. But the product has a distinctly different flavor from Star Wars. It has distinctly less fantasy in it.

: There are different types of sci-fi, and if you want to tella galaxy-sized
: space opera,

Boring, overused, could do with a bit of a shakeup. A space opera set in the sprawling, arthritic arms of a human empire that occupies one percent of one percent of one percent of the galaxy sounds big enough. Ten thousand stars, maybe with a hundred of them sporting a planet or a moon where Humanity can drop a settlement.

Hell, Alastair Reynolds writes space opera as rip-roaring as anything penned for Star Trek, and his spacefarers are purely relativistic. Where most writers shrink a planet down to the size of a single insular village, he populates his worlds with hundreds of cities (and orbital stations) and dozens of cultures.