If I wasn't shaking my head in pity, i'd be laughing my head off at how ridiculous the bolded statements are. But to each their own. Nothing has even come close to matching Halo:CE's campaign for me. I am immediately bored, jumping into the campaigns of 2, 3, and Reach. And I started to post a long winded diatribe at how dumb it is to throw in level repetition as a reason to bash Combat Evolved (it's such a weak argument), but then I decided it wasn't worth it. You either liked the game or you didn't. The repeat level excuse is just people trying to throw extra mud on the game for other reasons or motives.
The majority of the interior combat in CE takes place in tight corridors (PoA, and T&R). Compare that to the interior combat in Halo 3 that has stuff like the Brute hallway and the barracks in Crow's Nest, and the combat inside the cartographer in the The Ark or the towers in The Covenant, and you should see why the former isn't all that engaging. Hallway (corridor) combat can never be that engaging because how restrictive it is to player movement, and the game makes it worse later on by repeating them and adding Flood monster closets (Keyes, The Maw).
The repetition comes off as lazy, and after a while, it gets
exhausting, even boring. Sure, it can succeed in some areas, like some aspects of AotCR -> Two Betrayals, but after playing it so many times, the majority of the repetition feels like unnecessary drag. It's why I don't place AotCR ahead of The Ark or The Covenant any more – too many rooms.
Call it whatever you want – throwing "mud on the game for other reasons and motives" – but that's not what I'm doing. Liking a game or disliking a game can't be as black and white as you described. I love Halo: CE, but I do acknowledge its serious flaws. The game is a flawed masterpiece like most Halo games.
