Just popping by to say… out of everything you could worry about, SPI not having shields in lore is not something you need to worry about.
Just like Chiefs armour in Halo 4, just imagine it’s been upgraded with space robots.
They needed content so don’t blame them there play base was dying. think of it as a war for players. like a game of CTF or BTB. they have to compete with games like call of duty (the worst game ever) for a fanbase. the players are like there team, but say they are red team. then consider other fps game like call of duty, battlefield, ect. has blue team. now we (blue team) have a score of 7 and they (red team) have a score of 15. now you might think red team would win due to their higher score but blue team could still win because map knowledge, weapon skill, or overall skill. I do believe we have a chance!
In lore does it even make sense for this many variations of one of humanity’s most expensive pieces of technology to exist when if we are being generous there are maybe 1000 individuals even wearing them?
The lore of the Mjolnir project got ret-conned into oblivion a long time ago. But it made a lot more sense back when Spartan II’s all looked exactly alike, and only a few could tell them apart by posture and body motion (from Fall of Reach) and Spartan IIIs got extremely cheap, unshielded, low protection SPI armor. While the MP variants were past Mjolnir generations, pulled from other characters (like ODST) or simply non-canon multiplayer things.
I mostly blame Reach for this by the way. But 343 took it to a whole other level with Gen 2, and now even further with armor directly monetized, they are gonna churn out more helmets than Spartans that exist in the lore, just watch.