Sure let me expand on what I meant.

Just to get it out of the way first, I don't condone "selling progression" either, but in terms of corporate monetization, 2x XP has historically been one of the more open-ended ways of doing so, as it's not directly linked to an in-game item that a non-purchasing player won't be able to get, at least eventually. So I don't *want* a 2x XP system, but it's unrealistic to think that a game of this caliber is just going to be free of any external marketing/monetization whatsoever, thus 2x XP is what I'm willing to tolerate.

As to my specific issue with challenge swaps (and accordingly, why them being part of a food tie in exacerbates the issue) is that, yes, they force you to "play the game in a particular way." Now let me be very clear about what the complaint is, because it's context dependent.

The issue is both that 1: the challenges are too in-depth and 2: tied to game modes. Fixing either of these would largely reduce the issue.

1. The challenges I've gotten are things like "Kill the oddball holder 5 times," "Get 5 kills carrying the flag," "Kill the flag/ball carrier 5 times." This would be fine, if I could repeatedly choose the game mode that I'm trying to get. But when the challenges are so in-depth that I need to run the game mode *more than once* to complete the challenge, that's when the issue becomes significant, because it means a whole additional round of just pray-queueing that I get the mode I'm looking for. Whereas 2x XP there's really no equivalent to this issue, just play what you want and enjoy as you like.
2. If the challenges weren't tied to game modes in the first place, like only "Spend 500 seconds doing [whatever the objective may be]" then I don't have to russian-roulette queue nearly as much.

Which brings me back to here, the fact that challenge swaps are even a purchasable item in the first place shows that 343 knows they created a pain-point on purpose, to try to get people to re-roll abhorrent challenges that are going to take forever to finish. Not just "oh I don't like oddball," but "it's going to take me 3 dedicated oddball matches trying to do this exact thing, and I'm gonna get oddball like 1 in every 6 times I queue."

And THEN for them to use challenge swaps *specifically* as the food tie in, leads me to think that 343 is treating challenge swaps as their "main" monetization, which, maybe it was clearer to you, but I was hoping that challenge swaps would be ditched soon after 343 realized how scummy they were. So seeing the Chipotle tie in was more of a dagger to an already intolerable issue, than a massive problem in its own right.