The general restriction of the older way of customising your Spartan’s colours was that you we’re stuck with two colours with more or less the same pattern across all armours. Armour coatings don’t have to deal with this restriction, they can use as many colours as they want in any pattern they want. This opens the door for customisation that was never possible before.
However, most of the available armour coatings fail to be much more than a single colour or a combination of two colours. Creating a system that’s arguably less expressive than what’s been in previous games.
Just compare White + Cyan in Halo 2 to the “Bleached Bone” coating that’s part of a $20 bundle. You’ll find that they look almost the same.
That’s $20 for a bundle to do something that Halo 2 could have done on profile creation/editing. $20 is way too much for a "micro"transaction to begin with, but the Bleached Bone armour core really isn’t something players should be expected to pay for.
But this armour coating and a few others paid options are also the only way to get white on your Spartan, so there’s no White/Red, or Cyan/White or White/Black.
If you want your spartan to have those colours, you just have to wait for those combinations to get released, and buy them if they’re part of a bundle.
Now, I didn’t make this post just to complain, Halo Infinite is free, and it still needs to make money. The existence of microtransactions is fine as a compromise for Infinite being free and more accessible. Want to also bring up some examples of armour coatings that I feel like would be worth spending a bit of money (I still stress that $20 is way too much for a microtransaction, even as a bundle);
Ghost Grey has a geometric camouflage patten, what would not easily be created with the Primary/Secondary Colour system of previous Halo games. It’s been designed to look the way it is and isn’t just a basic application of two colours.
Wild Kovan, again, has a camouflage patten that would have been both unable to have been created under the old system and also appears to have requited some higher level designing compared to something like Bleached Bone or Scarlet Wake.
Noble Defender/Noble Portal is a set that’s not possible with the basic two colour system, and is also based on everyone’s favourite giant from reach, so it clearly has some kind of theming to it.
Willow Tea is a nice combination of three colours, but also have a unique pattern on the bodysuit. This is probably one of my favourite armour coatings, and I wore it right up until I unlocked Banished Deception.
(Yes, it is white which contradicts me earlier, but it’s also a weekly unlock, and I’m not sure if it’ll be available again for the players who missed it or start playing in the future)
Now you may have noticed that all of my examples are also free, part of the battle pass or campaign unlocks. I didn’t intend this when I went in to pick out examples, but I guess it’s a great showcase of how most of the skins in store aren’t really something I personally would want to shell out money for. No one other than the most of devout whales are willing to buy a slightly redder red, but if I saw these in the shop instead and a better price, then I might have bought them.
If I was somehow given absolute authority over how armour coatings worked, and I was allowed to act as self-interested as I wanted; I would start players with a customisable coating that lets them apply two colours to their spartan in a standard, no thrills, pattern. Just like how the old system worked.
I would then start filling the store with coatings more like my examples, avoiding the armour coatings that consist of a basic one or two colours.
Thank you for entertaining my massive wall of text.
TL;DR:
Much of the Armour Coatings in the store are far too basic, in my option, to justify being sold to players. Especially considering the price of them and quality of some free/battlepass/campaign alternatives.