I’ll agree that the infusion system should have never had masterworks in them. By their very name, mw cores should be used for masterworking only. Which is how I use them, ONLY to masterwork items. You imply there is a shortage of mw cores to be had, but it’s not factually correct. We’ve never been able to purchase them, we’ve never had consumables that let them drop from boss kills, we’ve never had a system that returns mw cores with partially upgraded masterwork tiers. MW cores are more ubiquitous than ever. It’s infusion that’s making things go haywire. I only infuse my dreaming city armor to dreaming city armor, Nameless to Nameless, bad omens to bad omens, etc..., soley by playing the game, the activities have provided plenty of same to same pieces of gear for me. This is why my mw cores have increased since Forsaken dropped! Same for leg shards. I can’t give them away, nor am I stupid enough to let the Spider Ponzi scheme to eat into my shards. My larger point is, that it is our actions that have lead to cores seemingly being more rare than ever. It’s not impossible to infuse same item to same item. Another point to be made is all persistent world games have an artificial wall for new/returning players, at least every one I’ve ever been a part of. Old timers have a distinct advantage whe farmable materials become valuable as they’ve spent more ingame time farming, thus they have more. It’s not isolated to Bungie, nor is it deliberate to the process. It is symptomatic of all games that have farmable mats. This is debatable at the philosophical level, but it’s so common, from my own experience, that I would call it the norm. You’ve been heavily commented here, mad props for keeping up with everything!!