You seem to think that you know better than all the hundreds of thousands of people that love halo for what it is. To be honest, gore would absolutely destroy halo to the point where I mightn't even buy it. Sure, you might talk about how headshots in Gears are satisfying, but only until you realise that its the same every single time; then it just becomes clumsy and distracts you from the gameplay. The lack of gore makes halo fun and charminh, rather than screaming about how manly and serious it is. And the problem with gore is that its a one trick pony; someone mentioned a legless Jackal being executed by a marine: first of all, thats not fun at all. Second, something like that would be very hard to do on the fly: whats to stop the player simply following up with a headshot, or not looking? Thus, it would probably be scripted, meaning players who arent immature six year olds whove never seen anything like that before will quickly lose interest. And that leads me to my main point: halos success is largely attributed to its sandbox gameplay, and frankly, gore is not consistenly interesting enough in a sandbox environment (keeping in mind that gears is very linear) to keep you playing. No matter how many times you blow a locusts head off, its always the same. Gore makes a game immature, like a kid giggly at his dad's nudie stash. If you want a mature game, make the story mature; after all, Reach is all about failure and devastation. Given a choice between legless Jackals and, say, a character ive come to love being suddenly taken away... well, I'm sure you can guess which I'd choose.
Oh, by the way, I found a video of most of the people who want gore in halo. (not that it'll happen)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JvJqh6NTnU
[Edited on 08.04.2009 9:50 AM PDT]