By 'better' I mean better stats, not better in terms of design or fun to use (I am sure they can make many cool new weapons in that regard, and from the looks of the trailers, that's exactly what they've done). Look at the VoG weapons. Look at the high-impact, high-range shotguns with perfect rolls. Look at Gally and Thorn. These weapons are all god tier and already warp both the PvE and PvP meta with how good they are. Time to kill in Crucible is the lowest it has ever been with many 2-shot primaries and 1-shot secondaries at crazy ranges. Fatebringer and Vision of Confluence shred mobs in PvE, and Gally melts bosses. And people want Bungie to make guns that are better than this? No way. That would destroy any hope of game balance for both PvE and PvP. Now, you could argue that maybe it was shortsighted of Bungie to make all their end-game Vanilla weapons so good. They got a bit carried away in wanting to give us cool rewards for their first raid, and cool exotics to use, that they jumped the gun a little bit. Whether or not you think that is true, the fact is, it's been done and cannot now be undone. So that is why we cannot ascend our old gear. Everyone saying that in order for us to want to use the new guns, Bungie should simply make them better clearly does not understand game design. That is the very definition of power creep, and while all games like this will suffer from that a bit, it's still good for the game overall to combat it wherever possible. Whatsmore, if Bungie did actually make the new guns better, then why would we even need to upgrade our old gear? It would be worse by comparison. So there you go. No weapon upgrading in TTK (aside from exotics), and that's a good thing. We may get some actual variety; a shift in the meta. Won't that be interesting and fun? To rediscover the god tier guns and the hidden gems? The new weapons look awesome. Fun to use, and probably as good as the current stuff; just not better than it.