Yes and no. The story for Destiny 2 is better, even though it's amazingly weak. Vanilla's story was even weaker, but it was longer. It seems that Bungie has lost everyone who knew how to write a good story. Destiny 2 wins this round. The progression system is both better and worse than Vanilla. You can get to max level with relative ease in Destiny 2. In Destiny 1, most of us were stuck at level 29 (not me, I made it to 30 on all three characters, but it was a big complaint). Destiny 2's progression system is a blessing and a curse. There's no reason to get max level other than to say you did it. But at least it's really easy to do. This round is a tie. The loot system is both better and worse than Vanilla. In Vanilla, you had about the same number of guns as Destiny 2. However, you had random rolls. So, lets say there are 100 guns in Vanilla and 100 guns in Destiny 2. Vanilla would actually feel like it had 1000's of guns because of random rolls, while Destiny 2 feels like it only has about 5 because they are the only ones worth using. Vanilla wins this round in a landslide. Vanilla had the best raid. It had the best raid gear by far. This is almost an undisputed fact, as every single poll places VoG at the top by a massive margin. Vanilla wins this round too. Content was an issue for Vanilla. There just wasn't very much of it. But, the content gave us plenty of reasons to replay it over and over again. I mean, we shot at a cave for hours on end because the loot was so good! Destiny 2 has a ton more content, but it doesn't give you a single reason to do that content once you've done it once. For me, this is a clear win for Vanilla. But many prefer the extra content, even if there's no reason to do it. So, in my opinion, Vanilla is far superior to Destiny 2. But there are things that Destiny 2 did better than Vanilla. Those things don't make Destiny 2 better than Vanilla, they just make it different. It depends on whats important to you. The most important thing for me is replayability. Vanilla had it, and Destiny 2 doesn't. Vanilla wins.