i see your point that Microsoft doesn't have the studio count that Sony has. This isn't anything new.
I don't agree with Microsoft's strategy of buying second party games as exclusives instead of building up studios. But it what they do. Sony has had a few instances of second party studios making exclusive games.as well. I don't discount them.
MS has plenty of studios now, they've added quite a few over the last few years, it's not about studio count it's about the quality of the studio as well as giving them what they need to realize their vision. I'm not discounting the 2nd party studios as far as the overall quality of the games I'm discounting them as far as the technical work when it comes to visuals. I don't think many of the studios that Sony contracts to do exclusives for them take advantage of the hardware as well as their 1st party studios do either, other than Ready at Dawn who did amazing work on the visuals for The Order the other 2nd party stuff doesn't match up well to the 1st party stuff IMO.
My point is that MS owned studios rarely seem to push the hardware the way that 3rd parties do on their consoles, the vast majority of the best looking games on the 360 were from 3rd parties not MS internal studios and that doesn't make sense given that 3rd parties also have to work on other platforms. For all the talk of about them being a software company they don't seem to be able to give their own devs the tools to get the most out of their console. I know people will bring up the 60 fps stuff for Halo but that started this gen, we had 8 years of mostly average looking 30 fps games on the 360.