The brouhaha over cores suits Bungie just fine. It's the same sort of smokescreen that they were glad to indulge a lot of people in over Tess and Eververse two holiday seasons ago. And the same issue underpins both: The Dearth of Desirable Content. Cores wouldn't be a problem if there were sufficient numbers of them or more direct ways of obtaining them. The real issue, though, is why we feel that we need them. We want to maximise the drops we've got and keep them maximised throughout play. But if we were getting desireable drops throughout play, we wouldn't feel this need. If significant drops were meted out in a way that players felt ever more powerful throughout their progression, cores would be a non-issue. Instead, we have broken RNG with cores used as a throttle to that progression because of the lack of "meaningful" (Bungie love this word, of late) content. We're getting rehashed play modes, a couple new story threads, and weapons from the previous version of the game because people are starved for content. Instead of foisting upon the player the concept of "meaningful" upgrades, I posit that it's upon the studio to develop a game with meaningful drops and progression to keep the player engaged. Bungie's experiment with cores has gone awry. We see through it, even if we plaster the boards with messages that slightly miss the target and Bungie are let off the hook for the real reason this game is sucking wind, the dearth of "meaningful" content.