The infinitube is just that, a big tube with greebling thrown on it and some round bits here and there. The Halcyon is probably the most guilty of just being a big box but the marathon had a very unique shape and silhouette as did the frigate. If you boil it down they're just giant boxes, but they look amazing and they have a charm to them. I already said bungie ships were generic, but they did it right. So yeah, I can't argue against the new canon that just flat out replaces all the stuff I grew up with and know.ДЄlso, as for the infinitube. In every bit of Bungie lore the marathon was a flat out better replacement than the Halcyon with the only exception being it didn't have the honeycomb design because that was stupidly expensive. Same with the whole 'the marathon had lots of problems and wasn't that much cheaper'. Yet apparently 343 retconned this to make the covenant stupid and do pointless ground invasions on every world. It was routinely stated that ground invasions were exceptionally rare. They showed up, wiped out whatever defenses the UNSC had, and then glassed the planet and moved on. In fact covenant never did ground invasions at all unless there were forerunner artifacts. I don't know what 343 did but in Bungie's canon the covenant glassed every human world they found, only exceptions being if there were forerunner artifacts and even then they just glassed everything except that area (see: Reach). For example the whole 'they didn't lose most of their colonies'.

I'm going to bow out here because you both are taking from the new canon which retcons a lot of stuff, and I know very little about it because it's all absolute garbage that retcons older stuff.

Unsc marathon class cruiser