Y'know, there's certainly a lot of blame to be thrown around as to who's responsible for this shitshow, but one name that I don't think is getting enough attention/hate is Jason Jones.
This could just be wild speculation I'm pulling out of my ass, but hear me out.
I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone here who Jason is, co-founder of Bungie and all. He's been there since the beginning, he's had his hands in basically everything Bungie's ever done, and even though he's the "lead creative" or whatever his stupid job title is and not the CEO, he obviously still plays a part in the direction of where the studio goes.
That wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that he has a history of getting very bored with something the studio has been working on.
Basically every time Bungie starts making a hit series, usually the second game in it, he gets tired of working on it and wants to do something else. He got bored of Marathon after 2, which is probably why Infinity was built by a team of ex-Bungie devs that wanted to keep going. I'm not sure about Myth, but it wouldn't surprise me if he also got bored of it after II, so Myth III was done by another company. He started checking out of Halo either around Halo 2's development or shortly after, but because they were locked in to a five-game contract with Microsoft, Bungie had to keep at it for the next few years. That didn't stop him from having the studio quickly throw together ODST so they could get out of the contract with Reach and not several years later.
So now we get to Destiny, another project he clearly had passion for at the start (remember the ODST tease years before we knew what Destiny was?), enough passion to sign yet another decade-long deal with a major publisher. The game was successful despite the tumultuous development cycle, and it keeps doing well. Yet once again, Jason starts getting bored. Maybe it wasn't living up to his initial dreams, maybe he finds the actual process of development after the initial blue ocean phase tedious, or maybe he just wanted to move on to something else. Again, that last one wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, creative types do want to keep challenging themselves, but it's a different thing altogether when you're running a massive dev studio.
This is probably why Bungie kept spinning up countless incubation projects over the years despite nothing coming of them. It would not surprise me if Jason himself was the main impetus behind these, hoping to find something new that would interest him more than Destiny was. And at some point, he must have been one of the main voices behind the notion to revive Marathon as an extraction shooter. Again, this would not surprise me; at the time, it was a relatively new genre (like looter shooters were when Destiny came out), it wasn't a crowded field, and there was the potential to leverage all of Bungie's resources to repeat Destiny's success and cement Bungie's dominance in another genre. It was the perfect combo of things to appeal to Jason's ADHD/manic-depressive/[insert armchair psychologist diagnosis here] mind, and he probably thought that Marathon would be such a huge success that the studio could forget about Destiny altogether and he wouldn't have to deal with that old garbage anymore.
But then Marathon had a rocky development (notice a pattern?), and despite much of the studio being moved over to work on it and making Destiny suffer in the process, it barely managed to hit its delayed launch and then flopped hard. At this point, the studio was left with a choice: try to balance updating two live service games simultaneously when neither was in a good place, or scrap one to salvage the other. The logical choice would be to give up on Marathon, take the L, and focus on the only game that has had a proven track record.
But that's not the Jason choice. Jason doesn't give a shit about Destiny anymore. It's over a decade old now, it's not new and shiny, there's no joy in it for him anymore. Thus, he chose to take Destiny out back and blow its brains out so he can go back to playing with his new toy...up until it eventually starts to bore him too. Then the cycle starts all over again...
Like I said, this is wild speculation from someone spending a bit too much time thinking this evening. But if any of this is even remotely true, it would explain a lot about what doesn't make sense on the surface.
