I admit I was one of the nay sayers against the current exotic upgrade plan. I'm still not a fan but have accepted it in hopes that it eventually evolves to something more clever and unique to Destiny. Personally, I feel the next iteration of exotic upgrades should build upon player's current progress. That progress should not simply be reset and the player asked to relevel the exact same weapon/armor. This goes completely against Bungie's original stance that they want players to have a story behind exotic equipment. In an attempt to bolster Bungie's original vision and foster a true relationship between a player and his/her exotics, I feel a better upgrade option would allow each player to customly add upgrade options to their existing weapon/armor as each DLC drops. An example of this would be an instance where players take their fully leveled base level exotics to Xur and purchase weapon/armor cores for each specific exotic. Once purchased, this opens an additional modifier column on the weapon/armor by which a player chooses a single modifier from 3 possible options that -- in turn -- upgrades the weapon with whatever perk is selected in the column. This selection becomes fixed and each subsequent DLC allows a new upgrade column with new possible upgrades added to whatever the player currently has built on his/her exotics. This is just one idea but one that I feel is far closer to the original intent Bungie proposed in terms of players building actual stories and strong ties with their exotics of choice.