I don't buy that it's a business decision. Talking from a purely programming standpoint, I'd do the same thing (given a tough deadline and a lot of important content to push out)... simplifying options makes the rest of the work much easier, and its easy to say "well, nobody does this, so let's remove it and maybe add it back when we have time". Think about how, by adding One Flag, for example, they'd need to set up and balance One Flag not only itself, but for every map and every map in the future. Seeing as it's 343i's first product, I can understand wanting to focus on more important bits first, which is why I'm hopeful that we'll be given more options now that it's post-release. At this point, fixing custom games probably would just be code copied into H5, so it's both updating H4 and making H5 better. The "it's a business decision" is a possibility, but Microsoft wants Halo to succeed as a franchise, not just as a singular title. I don't think there's any business people who go "lets reduce custom options and then add them when the game is less relevant!" It's obviously a possibility, but I think they stick to things more like release dates than actual features. From my experience, features are left up to the people making the game (as the business people tend to understand they don't get it)
But that's all just my personal thoughts from what I've seen, I have no evidence to support this is what they're actually doing.
But that's all just my personal thoughts from what I've seen, I have no evidence to support this is what they're actually doing.