The loot is there,but there's not much of it and it's hard to come by. On the plus side, you do end up with some really nice 'hand crafted' items. On the down side, it takes some serious grinding to level them up.
It's all about the shooting gameplay. If it hooks you, you won't care. I'm probably done with it for a long while apart from the odd PvP match; the news that I'll need to re-grind my exotic weapons following the latest patch is enough to put me off for a while.
Good shooters are a dime a dozen nowadays, so those MMO features are what makes the game for me and they feel, not great, like they saw games having this stuff but didn't really understand what made them fun but put them in anyway and tried to get away with it.
I dunno, I just want some crates to break and find meseta / vendor trash in
Didn't try the crucible yet though, will probably do that when I pick up the full version.
edit: also I went with Titan because punching things in the face is fun, but the starter shotgun it gives you might possibly be the worse shotgun I've ever used in a game.