At the end of the day, with the console still a way off release, it's not actually that concerning or surprising they haven't shown more of the game.
What lends more credence to these rumours about troubled development are employee reviews like these on Glassdoor, which paint a pretty damning picture of management (which to be fair is a fairly common complaint among reviews of most studios), but more surprising, of the tech and engine side of things. Hell, this one is just from a couple of months ago.
Cons
"It's shocking how an organization with Microsoft's resources and has been around as long as 343 has could be so dysfunctional. 343 has serious systemic issues that will take a massive effort to correct. Some of these stem from Microsoft policies (more on that in a bit) but also from executives that seem badly out-of-touch with their team.
It definitely feels as though the higher-ups at 343 don't understand how their studio is doing in day-to-day operations, and worse, seem concerned only with pleasing their superiors at MS corporate instead of being advocates for the studio and its workers. This means not pushing back on unreasonable deadlines or demands from corporate.
The obvious, primary cause for many of 343's problems lies with its over-reliance on contractual labor, as others have mentioned. This appears to be a policy within all of Microsoft, but it is especially damaging to a game studio.
Firstly, there's a lack of continuity which is a recipe for a bloated, hacked-together project as devs have to quickly learn systems that were created or modified by their predecessors (most of whom no longer work at the company) and to make hasty changes as they only have 18 months (or less) to get their work done.
Second, as others have mentioned, there is nothing more detrimental to morale and work ethics than a lack of investment (as many devs won't be seeing the project they're working on through to the end), and since so few contractors are converted, it's easy to see how in combination with the first point how this might lead to bad habits. Expediency is over-favored at the expense of sustainability.
Speaking of, there's the tech debt, which is probably better summarized as "technical bankruptcy" in 343's case: a now decades-old, swollen codebase littered with thousands of duct-tape fixes and a development infrastructure so flimsy that it more frequently hurts productivity than helping it. There were times when the entire studio was unable to check in new code or content for *weeks*.
Communication is absolutely atrocious at 343. The "primary" channel for communicating to folks is email, which also gets populated with hundreds of automated messages a day, creating a terrible signal-to-noise ratio and as such many people just will never respond to it. Without any quality options as official policy, it meant that if you wanted to get in touch with someone you had to find out what means or service they do use, and everyone uses different things.
Combined with the high attrition rate mentioned above, this also means that as a new employee you have to navigate this wilderness in order to talk to collaborators or clients, and frequently have to "cold call" coworkers to get work done. Crunch. An overcrowded and noisy work environment. If you're someone who has difficulty working with people constantly moving around your workspace or have trouble focusing with loud ambient noise, good luck."
Even the positive reviews talk about the "tech debt" and issues with the engine, which is weird, as this is supposed to be their brand spanking new and improved engine, but it seems it still has lots of issues.
Cons
"There's a lot of tech debt. The engine is old and cumbersome and so are the workflows. They're working on it, but they're not where they need to be yet. The game they're trying to make is too ambitious for their current time and tools. They've scoped it down a lot, but I still predict a lot of crunch coming up for most folks on the production side around milestones. Things are broken a lot and there are days when getting work done is a challenge. They're iterating on their processes but it's going to take time. It feels like people leave a lot. With Microsoft's policies on contractors, some revolving door action is expected, but even senior full-time people and directors come and go fairly often. I think they just get burned out. It's not super good for morale. It's really hard to get hired or converted to full time. They typically don't have many openings because of Microsoft rules."
This isn't to say these things can't be worked on or that the game can't still turn out incredible (see Uncharted 4 which also had troubled development and similar complaints about a high contractor percentage and turnover). I'm actually hopeful it'll be the best and most ambitious 343i Halo yet, but it certainly does paint a less than ideal picture of how things are going with the project.
