The two weapon limit is true to the suits themselves though. I clearly remember the female voice in HL talking about weapon selection system on. Meanwhile the Spartan Suit never hold more than 3 weapons (2 in hands and one in storage).
I never used the Hazard Suit on Playstation 2, but I was told told that they had all the weapons that they could grab. While on BOTH versions of the Spartan Armor, they had thier current weapon(s) and the 1 in storage.
Yes Spartan Soldier suit can survive ONE hit from a gigantic sword, and ONE hit (assuming it wasnt stuck) from an explosion. Meanwhile Hazard suit can survive that exact same blast (I cant say energy, because that involves including Tao canon, that rotating blue canon, the strider/flying guy, and that plasma rifle in HL2, which are according to you "GAMEPLAY STUFF"), and still is the same ammount down as the other suit (aka just as easy to kill).
The fact is that there is always gameplay issues in this arguement.
Heres an example:
--Great armies of zombies.
Yes Both of them have fought zombies. You start off with the zombies that are in Halo, those are all kinds and self replicating fast. Then the Normal half-life zombies which are slow. But then you Include the New zombies in HL2, and you have the exact same problem. Both teams of zombies have a wide arrange of stuff that they can do, and both do stuff like self replicating, and both can deal damage fast in thier own ways.
This affects the judgement of the suits in the fact that the zombies are the unit that both suits fight the most/hardest, so therefor its the one that most players will base thier opinion of the suits aginst. Which one is better in the most generic combat of them all.
-- Stuff that you did inside the game includeing cut scenes.
You have to assume that what happenes in cut scenes is always true to the whole way the suit works. If that means that your suit survived a fall off of a 100 story building (which none of them did in cut secenes), that means taht your suit can fall off a 100 story building.
Since The Hazard suit could fall off of great heights (in HL1) and make it to the bottom ok (I used the wall "ramp" effect to do this) that means that that suit can survive great falls if used properly.
However, in Halo, great falls could not use the "ramp effect" to cousion your fall. Even though the idea was you couldnt return from that fall, it doesnt matter. What the game didnt allow means that what happened must always be true.
In Summary
Gameplay will ALWAYS affect how a certain element in that specific game works. And if we get rid of the gameplay factor, we just get a usless suit. One that has no practical use. Because if there was no war, there is no reason to use either suit to begin with.
Therefore GAMEPLAY does affect the suit. So you do have to considder parts of gameplay in the back of your mind FOR your arguements about why the suit that you choose is greater.
We HAVE to assume that cortana comes with your Spartan suit, we HAVE to considder that the Spartan Soldier suit can never swim since user never did, we HAVE to considder that Spartan Suits can only carry 3 weapons max, and we have to assume that the gloves fit in the Hazard Suit.