Well actually, in the Book, Fall of Reach, John was there on the Planet, you can actually see him in the cryotube if you beat the game on legendary on the last mission, anyways, it'd be cool to play as him again, though.
Reach is a neat game with very creative ideas in it, but gosh, the bloom and the DMR was terrible. But Halo will always have that solid core fan base than Call of Duty, CoD is just a bunch of young kids wanting to kill someone easily.
I kind of agree, Halo, Halo 1, Halo 2 they were great without armor abilities, even in Halo 3 the equipment was dumb, thank god for MlG in Halo 3. But as you can tell the Halo population dropped in Reach, when it was super high in 2 and 3.