Halo has it's (extremely) vocal minority, but really Reach and ODST did fine and were in fact well received.
If it was general concensus that Reach wasn't fun at all, and not worth playing we'd find it like AvP3, with only a few players and even fewer searching on Matchmaking.
Halo in general is liked enough (screw that, liked implies one shared opinion) played enough, that it is a household name when speaking of gaming. And shows up everywhere as one of the most recognized shooter series of the modern day
