>too slow for the COD crowd
>too slow and shallow for the boomer shooter crowd

Halo Infinite couldn't keep up with the pace demanded of the live service crowd because 343 is just a bunch of contractors stacked on top of each other inside a trenchcoat, and its one bright spot was just that COD and Battlefield that year both simultaneously shat the bed. Going up against MWII or Black Ops was out of the question. And now Microsoft solved the live service problem by just now owning Call of Duty.

Really the question is what do they want to do with Halo?
I feel like they kept trying to escalate the conflict post-Halo 3 with even more powerful super evils and just made the whole giant galactic conflict seem even smaller in scale than it should have been, and over-emphasizing Master Chief as a superhero. Doom ran into the same problem hence fighting Cthulhu in Dark Ages. An entire universe of Spartans and they're like Yakuza, too afraid to not use John Halo for the sake of branding.
Do they want to lean more into golden age FPS standards? Balance combat around no regen health and having all guns at once? Faster combat speed? Try to play in a higher weight class of FPS design? I think with the covenant and the other ones using projectile weaponry it could translate pretty well.
If they keep the formula the same, is the switch to Unreal going to do what it's intended to do, keep on-boarding simple and technical/institutional knowledge easily transferred to make multiplayer not have glacial content updates?

Fortnite and COD see big updates every two months. That's your lodestar, that's the market any big live service shooter has to compete in.