I think we all remember the fiasco that was the Xbox One reveal. The policies surrounding it were not received well to say the least, which included but not limited to:

-24 hour online check ins.

-Used game fees and trade ins only being limited to certain retailers.

-Allowing you to only be able to gift a friend a game once but no way to get it back. So no exchanging games.

-Cutting down on game rental services.

-Mandatory Kinect 2.0 which is always on and watching you (lol).

On the positive side of things they seemed to have some kind of family sharing program similar to the share play function that the PS4 has now where you could share your games with up to 10 people (or "family members" as they called it). But even this feature was never explained properly. In fact the reveal of the Xbox One was a PR disaster as MS failed to communicate their vision.

So now the question is, what exactly were MS trying to pull with all these policies? Were they genuinely trying to push the industry forward towards a bright (at least in their own mind) future, but communicated it poorly? Or was it all just an evil ploy to grab as much money from the consumer as possible in the expense of introducing many restrictions towards how we played? Was it all Don Mattick's plan? What do you guys think?

Control over their consumers. Control equals power. Power breeds money.

They probably tried to have total controll over the distribution of their games. With most of those policies, digital would be the most logical option, and piracy would be even harder. Microsoft likes to controll things, its on their nature. Also, they probably spent a decent amount on the developement of Kineckt, and tried to make it mandatory.

They REALLY didn't expect Sony not following them on this policies.

I'll tell you what their intention was: $$$$$$$$

Basically, they saw gamestop and best buy and walmart taking in lots of money from used game sales and decided that they wanted to control that income.
That's really all there is to it.

MS wanted gamestop and all those used game retailers to use their azure cloud system to control used games, wherein they would get a cut of every used game purchase. Literally the entire idea behind the x1 is to support this system. It would have been a disaster. When you think about it, it would have upped all used game prices because retailers would still want their cuts and not lose money on them, users wouldn't be able to trade on ebay etc, and it would've just thrown the whole market into chaos.

More money for them.
The fee on used games would have slowed 2nd hand sales, so more brand new games are sold = more money for them.

Essentially they wanted to maximise the amount of money they could generate, especially from 2nd hand sales.

They, (as well as a lot of other companies) want a digital future cause digital distribution is > retail in terms of profits cause self space cost money and this was supposed to be their first step. Digital Distribution always warrants a DRM because it is arguably much easier/faster to distribute digital media to a large number of people rather than physical media if you have the right tools for it and Microsoft (as well as many other companies) needed a way so that their games cannot be pirated in the future because piracy is a very large and real issue for a lot of companies since PC already has piracy and consoles/handhelds get pirated around after 1 year of launch to mid-life. So I think thats why they did all that but obviously, they went to far with it

And the kinect thing was mostly a data mining thing

I think Microsoft thought these policies were already commonplace in PC gaming, and they're right to a certain extent. But they forgot that consoles aren't PCs.

They looked at data, but that data wasn't applicable to the console they were making.

Same mistake with the infamous TV/Movies focus at the reveal event. Microsoft saw from usage data that most Xbox 360s were simply used for things like Netflix. But they forgot that those people bought their console for games in the first place, and were simply watching Netflix during downtime between game releases (which the drought of releases towards the end of the 360's lifecycle could be to blame).

sell 1 billion xboxes, as it would be more like a multimedia center than a gaming machine.

MS could have had the best of both worlds. They could have allowed disc based games to be installed to the hard drive and not require the disc with the internet check in (Digital titles would work the same and this would allow them to implement their family share plans) AND they could have it how it works on X1 today i.e. disc required , no internet check in etc. This would have given the consumer the OPTION TO CHOOSE. MS were taking that choice away from consumer s and forcing an approach that the vast majority didn't want. It was an all or nothing attitude of MS' and as a result they are still seeing the consequences of that blunder.