My thoughts are in about the same place as yours. I think a few things really impact me about the whole deal.

1. How severely the MCC was/is broken. It's almost kind of hard to wrap your head around a AAA studio releasing something so broken. We're not talking about a Diablo 3 "cannot connect to server" kind of broken, but rather a top-to-bottom, soup-to-nuts, completely nonfunctional kind of broken.

2. 343i's sheer duplicity and raw contempt for its consumer base, from the 14-day-try-and-buy fiasco to the MCC. The MCC in particular demonstrated this contempt from cradle to grave. They wanted to release a $60 title for the console to move units for the holidays, but didn't (or wouldn't) want to invest enough resources to produce a $60 game. So they outsourced every part of it with disastrous results. The company knew the game was completely broken prior to launch, but after release they still pushed this light fiction on the consumers that the bugs were unexpected and fixes were coming soon. The fixes, of course, did not come soon, and in many cases haven't come at all. I don't think they've ever come clean about the whole deal.

3. How absolutely correct Microsoft/343i was and is in its estimation of the Halo fanbase, their eagerness to buy anything Halo-related, and their collective lack of self respect. The MCC was a disaster as a video game, but there's no evidence it did any damage to what really matters: their bottom line. The Halo community, short on memory and long on nostalgia, has accepted their railing by the H5 hype train and are lining up to purchase.

Stuff like this should turn any Halo fan's stomach:

: But even then, no, what happened doesn't bug me. It sucks, for sure. But it
: was never going to be an amazing game. It was basically just marketing to
: drive hype for Halo 5, and so they didn't go two years without their
: biggest franchise on the Xbox One.

There's a long table. At one end is the ruthless, mercenary Microsoft Corporation. At the other end is a Halo fanbase that does not expect $60 Halo games to work, or be good. That's the kind of environment that produces the MCC.