Wholeheartedly agree- one of the best posts in a long time. I'd just like to add one thing. Originally the grind was annoying but ultimately for specific purposes and as a player you understood the mechanics of this and accepted it's relevance within the game. When HoW dropped the grind changed its colours and although I accept that end game rewards are precisely that- rewards for finishing the game- it was the fact that the reward structure changed and those hard to get weapons and armour pieces required an extra level of grinding in addition to the weapons and armour pieces that you were already grinding for from VoG and Crota that began to sow my seeds of discontent. The game of limited content required more and more time investing in it to achieve those much sought after rewards which is fine if you have the time but no so if you don't. So after HoW dropped the grind changed its colours again and Trials endgame rewards became more important than those in the pve environment. Nerf followed nerf to supplicate the pvp player base resulting in a sense within the community that Bungie was basically writing off the main game in favour of Trials- a sense that prevails to this day. TTK arrived and finally with proper cut scenes and story transitions it felt that we were getting somewhere. But the grind again changed its colours and this time the rewards for the grind were more limited than before. Again players turned away leaving a hard core of players mostly playing within the pvp environment. And finally with rise of iron the grind changed its colours again... what more can be said? Most players accept that the game is great on some level but a constantly shifting 'currency' system for rewards, a lack of coherent story and out of game group finding made the game awkward for some and toxic for others.