Progression, and earning rewards instead of buying them

So we all know by now that the progression system is broken, and although 343 are trying to fix it, I’m not sure they’re going to go far enough to please most people. I’ve been giving some thought to what I would like to see personally, and I’ve come up with the following starting with the one I think we can all agree on:

Battle pass progression: Linked to XP gained through match-based performance rewards, i.e. score, kills, medals, etc, all rewarding various amounts of XP based on the difficulty to achieve, as seems to be most people’s preference, moving the challenges out into their own space.

So where does that leave challenges? Well, change them so that they unlock unique armor pieces for those particular challenge sets instead of earning XP. For example:

Battle Rifle Kills:
Rookie - 10 Kills - Armor core
Recruit - 25 kills - Unique Gloves
Private - 50 kills - Unique Shoulders (L+R)
Lance Corporal - 100 kills - Unique Knee Pads (L+R)
Corporal - 150 kills - Unique Chest
Sergeant - 200 kills - Unique Helmet
Master Sergeant - 250 kills - Unique Visor
Warrant Officer - 500 kills - Unique Armor effect

The armor core would pretty much be unlocked by everyone (10 battle rifle kills isn’t difficult to achieve) and would be usable with armor components found outside the challenges, but the armor pieces earned at the higher levels would be unique to the challenge set, meaning the only way to have them is to earn them.

I wouldn’t even be mad if they tied the challenges to owning the battle pass, especially given that it wouldn’t expire anyway, and then it could be earned at your own pace and is an aside from the standard battle pass. You’d then also know that the person with that full armour set has earned it for a reason. They could provide multiple challenges per season, and new challenges for each new season with new unique armor to earn.

Hope this all makes sense, and as much as I hope this sort of system gets introduced, I find it extremely unlikely unfortunately, but a man can hope!

EOD in Halo 3 - Completing the campaign on legendary
(probably) EOD in Halo Infinite - Buying an armor bundle in the store

It depressing that, in pre-game lobbies (that don’t even exist in Infinite) we’d look at other players armor & wonder how long it took 'em to splatter someone with a Mongoose to get the Scout shoulders, but now when we see armor the only thing people are curious about is how much they paid for it.

It sucks that the value of obtaining armor has diminished in Infinite.