Really their are even chest in raids which gave you exotics even more so with the wrath of the machine raid. The nightfalls in year 1 almost everyone got an exotic, you could buy exotic engrams from xur, trials chess and rise of iron which I saw a lot more people get exotics, heck I got gally and I still lost a match but I was on top of the leaderboard on my team. Especially since I was mostly solo and I was invited to raids and making friends which barely play destiny anymore ever since 6 months after ttk was released. I mean there was so many ways of getting one