Okay, ill just get to your last paragraph and this is where we will just have to agree to disagree.

For me, there is a lot more to it when purchasing a studio other than owning the IPs. Its a giant investment. Its taking on the entire teams and the full funding of the company and directions while taking on the profits and losses. When paying for a timed exclusive, its nothing more than to stop others from playing the games unless they wait, or fork out extra money and invest in a entirely different platform.

I cannot speak for everyone however for me, if a company buys the studio than its perfectly fine as long as they have dedicated the investment and resources into doing so. I didn't get angry or upset when Sony brought Insomniac even tho i liked Sunset Overdrive which now i will never see again due to the buy out. Because in the end, Sony showed interest in taking on the studio for future games. Its the exact same with MS buying Zenimax, just on a much bigger scale. The principle is the same. Timed exclusives is an anti consumer practice, buying studios is normal business practice. That's how i have always viewed it. 

Sure, almost same thing to buy a developer that for the past 20 years or so mostly developed exclusives that Sony own all the IPs and buying a major publisher because certainly Zenimax couldn't fund their games. You talk so much about poking the bear one one hand, you wouldn't have an issue if Sony bought S-E, Capcom, etc right?

Xbox is trying to catch up on years of neglect and get back lost marketshare. This makes their acquisitions necessary for proper competition. 

Sony buying more studios is just them widening their lead and retaining their stranglehold on non-Nintendo gaming. Not exactly the same thing. 

Exclusives drive consumers interest. I don’t see anything wrong in platform holders making deals and co-funding certain games to create incentives for people to jump into their ecosystems.

If every games release on everything, it creates redundancy and makes platforms lose their appeal and uniqueness.

But I’m among gamers fortunate enough to be able to adopt any console I want, and in fact enjoy going from one to another (despite preferences). So while the PS5 will be my go-to console of choice (having been on PSN for the longest time), the XSX is just a few months away from taking its place in my entertainment room, because I am not going to miss out on the new Fable (unless it’s really, really bad, which I doubt it will be), Hellblade 2, potentially Everwild, the next Moon Studio game, and then there’s so many backward compatible games I want to try or get again (like Lost Odyssey)...

All platforms offer something of their own through services or exclusives and that’s what I like most when going from one to the other.

If they all offered the same things, it would be effin’ boring.

I agree with the second paragraph. That’s the point of having competition. That said is there evidence of Sony co funding development? If so then that’s fine imo. If not, then 2 years is simply unheard of, especially for a 3rd party dev. It can create some bad trends on both sides. 

What people call moneyhatting isn’t just paying for keeping content away from other platforms. It’s an investment and deal to financially support development or marketing of a project in exchange for exclusivity, be it timed or not.

I think MS should counter this and FFXVI exclusivity by taking away Deathloop and Ghostwire exclusivity deal from PS5 and move it to a Series X exclusive. This will send a clear message to Sony and its third-party partners that if they want to keep exclusive games for ridiculously long periods away MS can retaliate by buying more developers.

They could I don't know, open studios. Let's stop pretending MS is a poor company being bullied by evil Sony. But that is the good point about you, you don't pretend, you want MS pooring money to buy marketshare and studios instead of pretending buying whole publishers takes less away than a couple games timed exclusive.

They did. The Initiative and Worlds Edge. Takes too long to make games as you can see and Xbox needs games now. They are doing both, organic and inorganic growth. 

MS isn’t a poor company but Xbox was a poor division (not anymore).

None of the studios MS bought brought any new game to Xbox, all of those were either already making 2nd party games or were 3rd party multiplat devs. Xbox was never a poor division, at most is was a poorly managed one, sure you can also say it wasn't a profitable one as well.