I don't want to hate on the man. But... He is the director. He approves ideas. He has the final word. That's his responsibility. To direct actors and ideas and the story.
The guy said that the ending wasn't scary because it was in daylight. Shooting at night is not a savior for a bad idea. That's so naive. The darkness can help make something scarier. But it's not necessary at all. It's like he forgot he was in the original. So much tension there, in the middle of the day. When your antagonist has cloaking abilities, then the time of day is irrelevant.
Poor direction and even worse writing. Lots of people keep going on about how it's Dekker's fault, or Fox's interference. Yeah, they're all to blame, as well as Black. It's a three way mess. None of them got what made the original great. They all shoulder the responsibility IMO. All three were putting in their ideas, and were overwhelmingly not liked.
Dodgy ideas with extremely poor execution. (not meant to hate on anyone who likes the movie, if you do, more power to ya)
I haven't watched any of his other movies other than Iron Man 3 (and I'm not a marvel fan, I don't care what they did to the Mandarin, I just found the movie a bit boring). So I don't have the knowledge of how he directed and wrote his other ones, but that really doesn't matter. He failed here, along with so many other contributors.
The greatest surprise was that ADI's predator suit (Fugitive) got better since the last movie.
I don't find any excuse worthy here. I'm not going to let him off the hook for this and ignore the problems that he was a part of. Even for the alien prequels which I enjoy a lot, I have the same type of problems with Scott.
Rant over. Sorry for this people but never in a million years did I think I'd be so upset about a predator movie since I enjoyed all of the A/P/AVP movies up until now (to a varying degree of course). It was bound to happen eventually... I wish I could enjoy the movie like some of the folks here do, but I just can't.
As for the original post. I love the skinning. Really doubt it has anything to do with feeding. Scare tactics, humiliation and territorial markings would be my guess as others have mentioned.