Obviously not. This also points to a Management "team" that is not watching how the game is managed.

Agree 100%. Nightfall changes look promising, but mandatory curated loadouts for raid is, IMO, the absolute worst, most idiotic idea bungle ever came up with. Bar none. Which at this point is saying quite a lot....

The load out raid is for the skilled raid player looking for a challenge. It's not meant for your player who only has 2 completions. I am excited for this. I've been putting teams together requiring people to use snipers through the whole thing just to make it a challenge and add some fun into it

Lol. Had plenty of fun in most of my 100+ D1 raid clears and didn't need locked / imposed loadouts to do it. So please, don't mistake lack of D2 raiding with lack of sufficient skills to clear this POS raid. Lack of interest and lack of sufficient clan mates is what you need to blame. It just proves the only way you can try to validate your opinion is to base it on an inaccurate premises. You should go work at bungle... Curated loadouts are yet another prime example of the dysfunctional "play the game the way we want you to play it" design philosophy that some bungie devs with severe control freak disorders seem to share... funny this would come from the Raid team. Guess Luke Smith really handpicked his flunkies well. I'm simply mindblown that this sort of idea still makes it past any form of gating process at this point... Enjoy the "challenge" of doing things exactly how some clueless overpaid neckbeards want you to because they think it corresponds to most people's idea of "fun" and "interesting." It just shows how utterly clueless and incompetent they are. Given the current state of this game and the financial prospects of any future instalment of this franchise, it won't be much longer until a long overdue house-cleaning takes place, and hopefully this sort of control freak mechanics / "good ideas" that were concocted in mommy's basement without any form of community polling or proper play data analysis will soon be a thing of the past. Don't know about you "highly skilled raiders" but most people and former unskilled D1 raiders like myself tend to play video games to have fun and as such generally like to have as many options and and much freedom as possible doing so. But it's good to know that feeling like boxed-in sheeple is an experience that appeals to a portion of forum users of what remains of the player base. Such a great idea. Must have been why, pre-release, they got in panic mode and clarified that locked-loadouts would only apply to HM nightfall and not HM raids... because the overall reaction was overwhelmingly positive... not sure if hamsters can suffer from ADD, but if they did, they would still have a better learning curve that some bungle designers. Thankfully (for once), like the OP stated, the right hand does not speak to the left hand at bungie. At least some design teams seem to grasp some basic game design philosophies and are instead introducing challenges that offer more freedom and possibilities to embrace various individual playstyles instead of repressing them, or shoving the meta of the moment down everyone's throat. Guess will be sticking to Nightfalls in expansion 2 as well. Hard enough to find 3 friends or clanmates on at the same time anyways as too many players have left this trainwreck already. And curated/locked loadouts are most certainly not what will be bringing them back.