In my humble opinion, Halo 3 social has always been lacking.
Bad Maps: My favorite Social playlist is Rumble Pit. We somehow had Anvil for over a decade and now we have somehow replaced it with an indoor, symmetrical, coagulation sized map. Is this serious? I guarantee that all of us would be very happy only playing the following maps in Rumble Pit: Epitaph, Ghost Town, Guardian, Boundless, Narrows, The Pit, Heretic, Citadel, Chill Out, etc. Did I mention Anvil? What about Default Foundry being in the rotation. Both were way worse than any launch or DLC map – we had enough maps not to need that yet we were forced to play it.
Damage too low:
This part is super controversial but I think its pretty objective seeing that we all play online with latency:
We as a community never agreed on buffing the default damage in Social Slayer to 110% like we did for Hardcore Slayer.This makes Halo 3 play much better online and makes 4-shot much more consistent.
I think this (rightly, probably) never happened because the damage modifier was not fine enough, and 110% broke the rest of the non-Hardcore sandbox. Mauler, rocket, snipe, BR, frag, plasma are the only weapons in HC (boring zzz). In one sense, the HC experience in H3 is miles better than Social, but we are stuck in a place where we can not fix the problem in Social because the necessary change would be unacceptable.
It is very sad because we did not have this problem in Halo 2! We end up gaining skills with degenerate settings and maps and compensate for latency. What kind of fun is that?