I've played quite a few MMOs in the past, and I've been at the head of that wave a few times.
It's a different kind of game when you play it that way, the contest of finding the most efficient tactics and groups and pushing yourself to be focused can be really fun. The obvious and pretty huge downside being you'll outgrow the content incredibly quickly.
As I mentioned, the contradictory aspects of games like these is what I find most frustrating. For every MMO I've played, the devs have always shown a distinct interest in the niche hardcore player bases. They often blog about the achievements of hardcore players, patch notes frequently reflect the preceding opinions of those with in depth knowledge of the gaming systems so there's good evidence they pay attention to their feedback (honestly, the backlash you read for the majority of patch notes are little more than violent knee jerks), and they understand these groups are incredibly important to MMO style games as their dedication, innovations, and skills contribute a lot to the build up of grassroots interest at the casual player level.
Yet they almost never design their games to actually cater for these groups.
Some games such as the original GWs (I know it's an old example, but its systems remain a great example of innovation within the MMO genre) have systems in place that allow the player base to really dig into the end game content in innovative ways (anyone remember the 55HP monk? Assassin Raptor Farming? M/Wo FoW spider beach?), but these things were inherent to a system that was designed with innovation in mind.
When it comes to a game like Destiny which - while allowing for some innovation in terms of group structure and individual set-ups), the depth isn't enough to allow a wide enough set of innovative builds to keep an extremely limited amount of gameplay instances interesting for too long.
Destiny's absolute main draw is the gunplay. It's easily amongst the best in the genre and possibly the best (on console at least) current example of FPS gameplay. Yet even the most playable game in the world will get old if you're forced to repeat the same few levels over and over.
All they need to do is spread out progression across the main game. Re-purpose all the old content: raids, strikes, missions, patrols. Add harder game modes relevant to end game LL. Add new loot tables for higher chunks of rep, marks, engram and end game loot rolls).
Doing this things like weekly lockouts would sting a lot less. There'd be a huge variety of content to play through, and "grind" would be called "playing" a lot more often.
The content already exists. I know dev time isn't infinite, but the additions to make old content relevant again are extremely minimal in comparison to the development of new content. I almost wish this had been the last major update instead of what we got with RoI (Raid aside, we always needed a new raid!).
I'm aware I'm goingon a bit now, so I'll stop, but tl;dr the contradictory nature of the way Bungie caters to its hardcore fanbase is baffling, especially when the solutions are so obvious.
