343 has never understood what makes Halo great.

Bionicle lasted longer than the relevance of the promethians in Halo lol

People can debate whether they prefer forerunners being humans or not all they want but my biggest gripe with the retcon is that it completely shatters the biggest irony in all the games.

The simple fact that the covenant never realized that they were genociding the very race they revered as Gods. Such beautiful poetic irony that is lost in the modern lore.

something that hurt prometheans too was the lack of color
something that they ACTUALLY DID in h5 multiplayer, making the classic silver, golden and red variants of units, which acutally made them more interesting to the eye

The reason the Prometheans were so hated is pretty simple:

1 - Bullet sponges. The Watchers and Knights, those guys sucked because they ate wayyyyy too many shots. In Halo 4 Knights can just eat bullets, and there's hardly any reaction. Their shields are borderline impossible to see flaring as you damage them, so there's also no feedback as to how much damage you're doing, or if you're even doing damage at all. Watchers were also shockingly tanky for such a tiny nimble airborne enemy, that had shields for some reason. The worst part is that Knights, at literally any moment and without any telegraph, can just teleport into thin air without any way for you to either stop them from doing it, or at least see where they're teleporting to. Their shields recharge so damn fast, that when they teleport away, by the time you found them again they were back at full strength. This alone was so annoying and stupidly designed it makes me wonder if 343i actually playtested their game, because any sane person would tell you it sucks and needed to be removed.
2 - Overuse. The entire second half of the game is basically just "Prometheans, Prometheans, more Prometheans." I get it, it's their debut game, so you wanna show them off. But holy FUCK these encounters suck. You only have Promethean weapons to fight them with, and ALL of the Promethean weapons are so weak and ineffective, that the only effective strategy is to use the Lightrifle from long-range to just spam shots at them until they die. It was so repetitive, boring, and yet the only strategy that didn't get you insta-killed by their undodgeable one-tap melee.
3 - No character. Covenant races had fun personalities and lore, and varied designs and animation that felt interesting. They flinched when shot, would yell and bark orders in various languages, Grunts would scatter and flee in terror when their Commander died (or sometimes ignite some grenades and kamikaze you), Brutes would get enraged and charge you when you took out their buddies, Jackals would cower behind their shields and kept their distance, etc. Knights are just boring, sterile robots. They stand there and shoot you. They don't flee, they don't kamikaze, they don't have any personality in their animations or dialogue (because they had none. They just did these high-pitched screeches. Why do robots screech, again?) You had only 3 types, one of which was basically a Sentinel, so there was little to no variety in Promethean encounters.

All of this is from Halo 4, because I never played Halo 5 after seeing how terrible 4 was. Reviews/gameplay videos after 5 came out told me I was right.

I feel like even the smallest forerunner weapon should be a power weapon.  The sentinel beam was just a low level utility tool for welding, cutting metal, or containing small flood outbreaks.  
The way Spark talks about the Mjolnir armor being barely useful implied to me that a real forerunner weapon purpose built for warfare should have been tremendously powerful.

Leave alone the multimillion dollar company.

"So let's take the combat elements of the CE flood but make them somehow boring"

Virgin Prometheans vs Chad Covenant and Chad Flood and Chad Sentinels

The Prometheans really should've been like the more combat-oriented ground version of the Sentinels.
Were it up to me, I would keep the Knights and Watchers, but get rid of the Crawlers and instead have different variations and ranks of the Soldiers.
For their aesthetics and behaviors, they should look and act like cold, ruthless machines, essentially being like if Bungie-era Forerunners made Terminators. In Halo 4/5, they really do look and act like the background Deceptions from the Transformers movies: Angry savages made of metal.

Also, this is my second attempt at leaving a comment here because it looks like YouTube for whatever reason deleted the first comment I made. 🫤

The thing I never understood about the faction was the name .
Prometheans get their name from Prometheus, of whom was a god in Greek mythology who gave mankind knowledge and was punished for doing so via eternal torment.

That name just doesn't feel fitting at all.

The hidden terminal cutscenes in halo 4 show the librarian securing the didact in his prison. She then touches the prometheans turning them blue as they now guard the prison under her control. When the didact is released he turns them orange again and the covenant somehow magically know who he is too and follow his orders.

The worst part for me is I don't believe the idea of the Forerunners having a warrior caste in their empire is inherently terrible, but 343 screwed it up so badly. The Promethans should've just been machines for the most part and only the Knights having once been actual people.

For me, they weren’t fun to shoot. It sounds dumb, but in the original Halo games the enemies were always fun to fight. They reacted well to the impact of the weapons, made it fun to fight them. The covies would yell out in pain/anger or the flood would take the impact but lose a chunk of themselves.

They also left a “mess” on the battlefield. The covies would leave brightly colored blood all over and the flood would leave their green blood and parts all over the place. After a hard fight you could look back at the mess left behind and it helped with the level of stratification of surviving that fight. The prometheans, just felt to “clean”. They didn’t react when getting hit and they barely left any trace after being defeated.

In Halo 4, knights are all over the place, recharge their shields very quickly, teleport before you even dent their shields, and kill you instantly with melee that cannot be dodged. The weapons in their faction makes my blood boil even more with the scattershot only effective at point-blank range, the boltshot doing insignificant damage to knights shields using its pocket shotgun ability and its inability to engage beyond medium-close range, and the suppressor is so useless it makes the H2 shotgun look like a destroyer of worlds on Legendary. The light rifle may as well be the only weapon in the game since that’s all you use. I remember one time in Shutdown, I found a black knight with a binary rifle. You can’t even neutralize his shields, yet he can kill you with one hit wherever you are. I was never so angry in my life.

The Prometheans are arguably worse in Halo 5’s campaign. Every promethean level is holdout section after holdout section after holdout section. It wouldn’t be as infuriating if you were forced to use promethean weapons again. Despite the abundance of UNSC weapons in this time around, they’re not gonna do shit against the knights. While the suppressor especially is more effective in H5’s campaign, you’re still forced to use the promethean weapons against them. While Halo 4 emphasized that you have no other options, Halo 5’s sandbox is more of an illusion.

I never thought I would hate an enemy faction as much in any video game. But 343 just had to be 343.

Prometheans were created in-universe for the explicit purpose of combating the Flood.

We never get to see Prometheans fighting Flood in any games.  Ever.

THAT is the biggest tragedy of all.

One thing I just remembered that Bungie did with their version of the Forerunner auto turret was if you used it outside of the control room and then did the whole thing with Guilty Spark when you came back out it would actually turn against you like the rest of the Sentinels

I remember an interview for Halo 4 where they said they specifically hired people who didn't like Halo because they wanted to "breathe life back into it" by basically changing everything about it. And that's where they fucked up.

The worst part about the knights is that there's no accepted strategy to defeating them. There's no noob combo like with elites, no matadoring like with hunters, no hand shooting like the jackals, just pump your entire magazine into them and hope they die. They're like the brutes in Halo 2, but at least they didn't teleport.

Something you didn’t mention. The watchers are kill on sight. It becomes obvious after facing them a couple times that you have to kill them first every time which is just repetitive. A wave of covenant can be fought any way that you want: pick off grunts first, or kill elite first and grunts scatter etc. another thing is that promethians don’t look like they have shields and it is difficult to tell when they are down or not which is another annoying aspect. Shield status on elites and brutes was always communicated to the player