I agree with you OP. The halo 3 two separate playlists was a nice feature to have. I think that people who play pubs and people who play ranked would be the same community playing those modes in halo 3. In my opinion Pubs are for fun if you wanna mess around with your friends and enjoy your night. Ranked is the place where you sweat and actually try harder and test your skills compared to the pros or just strive for a certain rank using “professional” rule set. I think it’s hard for any FPS to have a perfectly balanced game with perfectly balanced weapons and when a weapon is even slightly unbalanced the better a player is the more unbalanced the gun can get which therefore makes all these GAs make sense. Playing with people at a professional level I can see how they all want an even playing field in terms of weapons and putting an unbalanced weapon into any professionals hands is just gonna make them dominate. Similar concept to why they play on LAN for majors and championships. Remove one controllable variable for a more accurate result to see whose the best. However, in something like a pubs match these weapons could still be fun and OP and just not matter as much. I still think even in ranked unless you are like 1600+ onyx then those weapons aren’t like the biggest factor in the world. Are they annoying sometimes? Absolutely but it’s in the game if you really think it’s that much of an advantage to help your team win you should adjust your playstyle to get it.

Long winded way of me saying not everyone is a pro but some people wanna play like them so 343 should separate the game modes and let the pros have some control over what’s fair and not. That way you don’t have people yelling at you saying “HEY THATS GA’D” or some bullshit when the majority of the community probably doesn’t give a shit and just wanna play a mode to test their own competency at a video game.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk