I honestly don't think it's primarily Activision. When Bungie was doing Halo, Microsoft was their publisher [i]and[/i] owner. Microsoft straight acquired them. As far as I know, Activision is only the publisher here and should have somewhat limited control. I think Bungie is slowly going Dark Side. Increasing profit by primarily decreasing costs instead of increasing product quality, i.e. decreasing unique content and increasing re-skinning/re-use of existing resources. Destiny launched into a dry spell for video games. Particularly a long dry spell for interesting new IP in the FPS genre (Destiny is more FPS than anything else). Destiny is an above-average game, not spectacular, but definitely above average. And it only needed to be above-average to succeed financially at this time so that's what it did. It was about the profit, not the art, this time.

wouldnt surprise me. Bungie's community and communication was amazing when they were working on halo