After writing a massive response to the thread a while back I didn’t want it to go to waste so just for you, I took the liberty of giving it a whole thread for itself. I hope this causes lots of discussions surrounding Halo 2 and Halo 4 -two games which the community are arguing about which is the best. (Oh and I also added a poll just for the sake of discussion).
Enjoy!
Right, I will go through your points section by section and argue what I believe to be a perfectly valid counter argument.
HCE -
The Halo CE was simple and too the point. It stuck to the principle weapon roles sticking close to its genre as an arena shooter. 1 sniper, close range, mid range, ect. keeping the maps free of clutter and allowing each player to learn the skills needed for each weapon. Camping was rendered difficult as weapons killed quickly and grenades were powerful. Although there were no weapons designed to destroy or disable vehicles the player was forced to either kill its passengers or learn how to use grenades properly. Many of the CE maps had few vehicles anyway and those which did were either designed specifically for vehicular combat (blood gulch) or had sections which were completely vehicle free (sidewinder). Needless to say CE was far from ready for XBL as it was a difficult game and required lots of skill to play. The kill times were quick if you knew how to play otherwise it could take a full pistol clip just to drop one player. For this reason Halo CE has been regarded as the competitive milestone for Halo by many players.
H2 -
Introduction of many new weapon roles providing a good development of the original Halo formula. The (accidental) introduction of skillful button combos for those players who did know how to use them and for those who didn’t it introduced a whole new level of skill to the game. Things like ‘superjumping’ also appeared which did no less than destroyed the maps (however this could be easily solved today) although in real life matches most players did not get the opportunity to use them (as they were too busy getting shot at). Glitches were riddled throughout the game although I do not count these towards Halo 2 overall MM score as they are things which can be easily fixed today as programming has significantly advanced since then.
Halo 2 was an important milestone for strategy in Halo as well. Charging in with SMGs often ended in dying and control of key positions and power weapon spawns became essential. Melee was also rendered low power - yet again adding upon the amount of skill you needed to play the game at a high level as you were expected to kill your enemy using weapons/headshots rather than resort to ambushing (with melee) or beating down your opponent before he could lower your shields.
The ways to counter vehicles had increased from the first Halo something which was needed for XBL. Boarding, plasma pistols and rocket-lock on were all added; and more importantly could all be avoided if you were good enough. The allowed players to develop the skill behind driving vehicles, destroying/disabling vehicles whilst still making driving vehicles fun (instead of just being constantly stuck, plasma pistolled or lasered like in Reach).
There were however a few bugs within the game (aside from the glitches). The weapon spawning did have issues however (as mentioned in the OP so I won’t go into that) although one could argue that this meant you had to find and kill opponents to continue the game (for this reason it wasn’t too much of an issue within MM). The BR was also extremely powerful however this is where the community divides - was the BR OP or were the other weapons nerfed? IMO the BR was fine the way it was however its laser accuracy did cause many problems and this issue was addressed in Halo 3 (where the BR was rendered annoyingly inaccurate). A mix of the Halo 2 BR and the Halo 3 BR was be a nice compromise. The ranking system was also broken however this was fixed in the later years of Halo 2’s life (I think after the release of Halo 3).
Overall Halo 2 is a good example of a skillful Halo individual to other shooters. With brilliant maps, a good weapon set which remained uncluttered and with amazing reply value (as it too so long to learn all the skills need to get good) Halo 2 remains to have the best MM in any Halo IMO.