Difficulty in Destiny is a constant bone of contention. Yes, in my opinion for the skilled player the best way to add difficulty is to handicap yourself. For me personally, being a skilled player and having god tier exotics to be able to roflstomp through endgame activities would be pretty boring. I can already do that in Strikes and Patrol with current weapons... it's not the excitement that I want. I agree that a 335 endgame mode would be awesome, however you then have the issue of loot and an activity that provides no progression to the player. The Destiny community has already made it quite clear that activities that don't provide progression will be generally ignored no matter how much fun or how challenging they are - I don't see a 335 mode faring very well because of this - though personally I'd play it for guaranteed 335 loot that looks cool. As for the difference between exotics and legendaries, it lies right now in uniqueness. And as most players have 100% of exotics in the game, exotics aren't really unique. So they aren't unique, and they aren't super powerful, so they don't feel special. To some extents a more modular system where you can roll a unique exotic would be better. Say if there were exotics as now, but then there was a pool of exotic perks that could roll on multiple different weapons - lets make up a perk here "Madness Quotient" which causes enemies to attack each other, procs on a random bullet in a mag and you have a chance of rolling it on any archetype of any special weapon, and on that special weapon the colours will roll an RNG paintjob and the rest of the perks will roll RNG style - then you could have a full team all with a "Madness Quotient" that are all unique but all have the same exotic perk. I think that would make exotics [i]feel[/i] more exotic.

I sort of agree. But I don't think people only play for progression. Why would people go to the lighthouse multiple times in a weekend? It's because it is actually challenging. At this point, the challenge is more important than the loot. But I want to be challenged at my best, not because I'm playing down to dumb AI levels. For me, again at this point, more important than progression is cosmetics. There is a serious lack of customization in this game. The number of scarab seeking LFG posts was out of control awhile ago. Why? Emblems literally do nothing for progression. I think that the reality is that we all have this giant wish list for destiny 2 and we are kind of imposing it on this version. We want it to live up to its potential. But I highly doubt anything significant will happen with Rise of Iron and future patches. In a perfect world, exotics would be truly exotic, and there would exist challenging and fun PvE endgame content that didn't become a joke when you max out your level. Add those to the growing list of items for destiny 2 and keep your fingers crossed.