Yeah, I think it's more or less just poor writing instead of an agenda. Gears had suffered silly plot/drama excuses for a while.
As a Gears fan, I think the series as it was, should have ended with Gears 3. There is nothing Coalition can do that will make it substantially better an experiencethan that game was.
What should have happened with Gears 4 is an entirely new direction for the series. Something unexpected and exciting. What we got was just a safe continuation of the original formula. No doubt this was done because they wanted to play it safe. But the result has been a rather lame, somewhat fan fictiony story that's rather boring, with dated gameplay mechanics.
Why not go to a new planet? Why not reinvent the gameplay loop and try to do something new with the series? Add a dialogue wheel, character creation, etc. I'm just throwing out ideas here. But there's nothing that says a series has to stay the same forever, and I don't think that it should.
But it is what it is. It's just more Gears. It's the safer bet for Coalition and far lesd work. Thats the other part. I imagibe they dont want to cgange much because it requires a lot more work. Everythong was already built by Epic. Sure, Coalition makes new assets and updates old content, but the bulk of the work has already been done by another studio.