Bungie's biggest mistake was calling them exotic. Their intent was for special legendaries with non random stats and a unique perk that looked, sounded, and felt awesome but weren't necessarily more powerful than their legendary counterparts so that people who didn't have them could still compete (so you had a much bigger pool of weapons to choose from vs the handful of exotics). Unfortunately for a lot of people coming from other games "exotic" and "legendary" are usually two distinct tiers of gear, so for them not to be here was very jarring. Plus a lot of those same people crave vertical progression, so to go from legendary to exotic and find it to be minimal improvement in many cases was also very jarring. Consider this, imagine they did make exotics their own tier. Now you max all legendaries and swap in your 2 exotics, and now the exotics are the only thing that make a difference. Your pool of options just shrank massively, it becomes all about, and only about, which exotic you're using. It is actually a *good* thing I can look at my exotic and say, you know I got this set of legendary boots that has perks that fit my playstyle better than the dance machines, or than the Symbiote, etc. Does that unique perk synergize with my playstyle well? Awesome. Does a legendary fit better? That's awesome too. What needs to be fixed is not simply turning exotics into all god tier weapons/armor, that is, to be honest, the short lazy solution. Instead they need to focus on making the unique perks actually more unique.