I think the game has the potential to be a very interesting game, but the negative hype regardless of quality is going to be huge because of the comparison and the FPS/strategy rivalry it will create. I don't feel like I've got the emotional strength at the moment to defend a game from all that fuss.
... so I guess I would rather they don't try to introduce a potentially innovating game to the market because they chose an IP which is just going to screw them over even if it is good. It's sad, but that's the way it is. Maybe if Syndicate was good we'd be more open to the Fallout 3/New Vegas are good games argument, but it wasn't so this game will fail.
The problem is if the dev team had put a lot of work into it, that works probably gone to waste, because breaking in a new IP is hard enough and the game probably won't have enough support to make a lot of money, so the publisher would have to push the game out whilst it's still buggy and unpolished.
Just maybe they might hope that the XCOM strategy game builds up some public IP awareness amongst non-game-forum-posting people, because those are the sort of people who could be sold on the idea of a shooter sequel probably, but I don't imagine the XCOM strategy game is going to particularly sell in that demographic anyway