The short answer is that they have an opinion on what target engagement should be, and they believe that their opinion is more valid than anyone elses'. If they continued to *ONLY* buff weapons over time to bring them in line with each other, you'd eventually have Hand Cannons that 1 shot head, 2 shot body - Snipers that could 1 body shot (max impact) 2 body shot (minimum) - and Scouts that could 1 shot head, 2 shot body. Time to kill would eventually be 0.25 seconds; where Destiny developers would rather keep that as close to 1.5 as possible. Would this game be better off if they *ONLY* buffed weapons when needed? More than likely, yes. However, without an anchor on DPS, this will never happen. Same goes for all the different "arch-types" - - they make their weapons and the weapon trees UNBALANCED to entice variety, but you can never have performance balance this way. Bungie constantly NERFS items, even against the community's wishes, simply because they want people to spend more time in the game. They also want poorly skilled players not to feel like they can't play the game competitively. Driving down the skill gap allows horrible shooters to at least have the chance to run away and get an assist, and feel good. This is Engagement Manipulation. Much like they way they drive gambling addiction for the Eververse Trading system, and standard addictive qualities for their drop system, they also manipulate Multiplayer Engagement to equalize gameplay. However. You can't make good players dumb or stupid by manipulating the skill gap. Just makes great players into good players and bad players into the worst players you've ever seen. In a competitive atmosphere, the more players you lose to skill abandonment means; the more qualified your game is for high end players. Also, its credibility. To Bungie, the only thing that matters is play time, and data revenue. Manipulating engagement does just that. And it won't ever end until their player base means more to them than money. [b]TL;DR[/b] [i]: : : Bungie always Nerfs and refuses to listen to the Community because they want to decrease the skill gap, increase kill time, and keep unskilled players confident enough to raise Destiny's playtime higher; so that Activision and Shareholders continue to fund, and donate money towards this game and future revenue. Long-form is above.[/i]