It pains me to know that there are people out there that don't fully understand the effects that sprint have on the game.
It goes a lot deeper than someone sprinting away one shot and not dying, it goes a lot deeper than someone sprinting off spawn to finish you off when you were still one-shot from the last battle, and it goes a lot deeper than 'its just copying COD'
It completely -Yoinks!- with scale - that is the issue. Please describe to me a perfect map for sprint, a map that would work better scaled up for sprint, instead of left normal for no sprint. Does such a thing even exist? Can a map possibly be better made for sprint and with sprint, than made for no sprint and without sprint? No, its impossible.
Geometry has to be scaled to the abilities of spartans; the jump height, how far you can strafe in 1 second, how far you can throw a grenade, a grenade explosion radius, the effective range of your starting weapon, how long it takes you to move from one piece of cover to the next, all of this stuff, is extremely important to how the game plays. Yet it is all thrown to the wayside in favor of making sprint work. Maps have to be scaled up (aka overscaled in relation to all previous factors) to account for sprint.
Gandhi has talked about this before; the lack of power positions, but he wrongfully accused the killtimes as the culprit. While slow killtimes don't help, sprint is what really ruins power positions. I have used this example before but I will use it again:
Pink on Midship in Halo 2. That was a true power position and functioned as such, but no matter what we do we haven't been able to replicate the power and feel of the power position in anything we have made since that game. Why is that? Its because of sprint, nothing else has fundamentally changed the game as much as sprint has since then. Currently not even top middle on dispatch rivals the power and counter-strategies (which are equally important to consider) that pink provided.
When you held pink in H2, you had effective means of gunning down your foes as they walked from the base to pink. There was a relatively long journey to make from the cover of the base, to the cover of pink. This meant that it was dangerous as you had to expose yourself for a long period of time to be able to take the tower over. What this meant for the person holding pink, is that as long as they periodically checked the walkways to pink, they were free to shoot from pink and deal damage across map.
But what happens when you add sprint? That long journey is now a quick one, you can now make it into or under pink alive even if the guy at pink was looking at you, the guy holding pink now has to *constantly* check the walkways to pink, instead of just periodically, which means he now cant shoot from there without the serious risk of someone backsmacking him or gunning him down from the side. He also has to have 'internal' battles with people sprinting at pink more often, than actually using the power position. This is why top mid of dispatch, and even pink and gold of simplex, are such clusterfucks and pale in comparison to the gameplay that pink provided in Halo 2.
The fix to this issue some say, is to scale the map up. Make those walkways to pink longer so that it is still along journey to make even with sprint. But that creates two issues:
1) Lessens the effect of shooting from pink - if the rest of the map is further away, the power position has less presence and effect on the map because you cant do as much damage or get as many angles (imagine if pink on simplex was pushed back an extra half-map length, goodbye angles into bases)
2) Over-punishes the attackers. If you make it so a distance is a long one for sprinters, that means it will be impossible to walk. it also means you cant freaking shoot while you push. It makes balancing any area of the map extremely difficult as it needs to be large enough so that you can track players and so that power positions are actually power positions, but not large enough that it disables attackers in such away (not to mention any up-scaling -Yoinks!- with the scale of all the other combat components I mentioned earlier).
And the 'but you get slowed down when you get shot' argument doesnt fix ANY of these absolutely serious issues.
Remove sprint now.