The problem is Bungie designed themselves into a corner of not being able to produce a linear progression. Vendor gear should not be better than VoG gear and VoG gear should not be on par with CE gear. If VoG gear match's CE gear then what's the point of doing CE? Imo, VoG gear should all be an in-between just like the Vex. Better than vendor(pre TDB vendor), gets you in, and effective in, CE. But not as good as CE gear. What they've done with the vendors made the VoG pointless outside of the Vex, upgrade mats, and the chance for other exotics(yet still 300). This is bungie designing the game around "on-demand" attention spans that, to me, says bungie expects a lack of new players to support keeping the grind linear. Bottom line, though it's a fun game, it's fundamentally a poor design of a game.