they didn't eff up, they knew exactly what they were doing they just overestimated the playerbase's ability to absorb their lies for one more go around. The bottom line like any good con that goes on for too long Bungie realized at some point that they could make a stupid amount of money by just selling what essentially amounts to nothing (microtransactions). When they realized that they could do this and not only would the players take this but that some would even defend them even though they lied they kept on and each time they lied the players moved the goalposts for them. If you are really a dev then you know that there are devs out there that will do the minimum amount of coding and then sell that code for the most amount of money and if they can get by with just ctrl+v'ing that code with only minor changes and still sell it as something new then they will do that. That is what has happened with Destiny. The Devs got lazy. Occam's razor, it's really not complicated. If you go back through the history of the development of this game and the first two years of this games release you can actually see it play out in real time. They actually completely scrapped their planned release schedule for content and DLC after the Eververse store released and they started making money hand over fist. Then it was tweaked again when they realized they could tell the people that this store was going to pay for them to get free content and then never actually deliver that content. So no this isn't a story about a beleaguered dev team that thought it's playerbase wanted one thing and then was wrong. It's the story of Goldman Sachs trading in increasingly toxic mortgage securities until finally the bottom falls out.