Cheers for another good read
I'll have to agree - in order to make money on a game nowadays, it has to be more "Modern Warfare/Halo" than "vanilla Ghost Recon". A majority of the market aren't interested in spending a long time in some variety of the good old Rainbow Six "planning phase", they want to be able to jump in and shoot stuff. This is the age of instant gratification, after all.
Sadly, this means that traditional "tactical shooters" or MilSims will be developed with a sigificantly smaller budget, or else the developer would lose money on making games. Whereas the well-developed and polished games will be made with a "feed the masses" mind-set.
In regard to Modern Warfare 2 and friendly fire - I feel this just gives the game a more "casual" approach, and makes it easier for me to just jump into the game and blow the enemy team up. Which, again, is what the majority wants. And for the more hardcore players, there are the appropriately named "Hardcore" game-modes
To back up a bit, to the whole soul switching issue: I'm all for this assuming the open-ness is there to support it. I see no need for such a feature if the game is an "on-rails" experience, but if it leans more towards vanilla GR, I enjoy scenarios such as those described earlier: Switching to the sniper to take those first shots, then back to the assault squad and go in hot. I want to play the game, I don't want the game to play itself for me
And since I forget whether or not I mentioned this already, I'll touch on the Ghost Recon franchise thing too. A franchise name, for me, is more about the story and theme rather than the genre/sub-genre. I can't recall any public outcries when Command & Conquer: Renegade, SWAT2 or - more recently - Halo Wars was released. At least GRFS will still be a shooter xD