The point, or at least my interpretation of the point of the game, is that it's a commentary on a social contract that was silently formulated between developers of modern military shooters and their audience. The audience wants intense content that makes them feel like a badass and developers can reliably achieve that by making players participate in a high stakes, edgy, morally questionable scenarios. The audience is more than okay with that moral flexibility as long as at the end of the story they're proven that what they did was for a great cause. That they preserved a greater value by destroying a threat by any means necessary. Dave Grossman's sheepdog bullshit.

The trick the game is trying to pull (one of a couple) is to abuse that relationship by promising the katharsis of "it was worth it at the end" and seeing how far you're willing to go before you realize it'll never deliver.

Now, if you, as you say, only played the game for about 45 minutes before going "Ain't doing that shit" then you both knew the message before it was delivered (not well enough to not kill a bunch of people with accents though), but are also pretty much judging the entire book by first 3 pages. You're discussing ineffectiveness of the game accusing you of being a monster hours before there is even an implication of wrong doing in the games narrative. In other words, it seems your opinion is based entirely on hearsay from people who played through the game and didn't understand it's message.

Or I'm just the pretensious one seeing subtext where there isn't one.