All is by design. The developers (or at least the people pulling the strings) have a plan. [b]TLDR[/b]: By forcing everyone in to a narrow curated playlist where the 'old' content is side-lined they can actively reduce the number of people playing that content, which sets them up to justify removing it later when they have the stats to back up the decision. Don't be fooled though, the decision has already been made! They have realised that an epic on-going story requires more and more effort to maintain the longer it's established and the more it is added to, at a certain point this becomes a problem. The size and scale of the task grows to be too big for the size and scale of the (shrinking) dev team maintaining it. This is why so many games now want a shallow repetitive game-play loop that they can just keep refreshing with a new season pass (though very little new content, just a cosmetic refresh) for years at a time to keep the money pouring in. Depth of story (aside from requiring much more creative talent) creates a depth of personal individual (emotional) investment, which in turn creates a more demanding community who expect their attachment and investment to be honoured and maintained. Companies [b]do not[/b] care about player's emotional investment, they only care about their [i]financial[/i] investment. They do not care to create meaningful characters and rich stories/backstories with a deep underlying lore, they are not Tolkein and quite frankly expecting such is absurd. -- Of course the sad truth is that once upon a time Bungie had that motivation, that drive to create rich, multi-facted lore with epic world and character building. Alas from a corporate stand point at least that proved to be "fiscally inefficient" and deemed too 'ambitious' ... less effort (financial outlay) for greater rewards (profit) is a much better corporate strategy -- i.e. When the bean counters rather than the creatives are running the show! Why else do you think there are so many "Warzone" clones and Battle Royale games? Mindlessly repetitive but petri-dish shallow efforts to leverage maximum profit from minimal effort. -- The whole [i]"Here's one level, keep playing it over and over again, in the same game mode, endlessly, just with different people. But don't worry if you get bored because we have an ever growing catalogue of meaningless cosmetics you can buy for additional [b]real[/b] money whenever you need an actual tiny dopamine hit"[/i] This is why indie games and bedroom-developer projects tend to be 'better', in many ways that matter to players who value the [i]value[/i] of the content over simply having the latest graphics engine and a big name IP.