Originally, the power climb was just part of the game. If you wanted to do content at the "highest level" in a season, you would have to play and get XP for the season to level your artifact, and at the same time you had ~10 light levels to grind through pinnacle activities. XP could supplant grinding those levels, because the artifact would boost your power. This was okay for the time, but it eventually got boring.The MOST IMPORTANT thing about it, however: was that the "best gear that you could get" was not locked behind the power grind. As long as you were at a power level where YOU could run a master-level dungeon (with a group), you could get artifice armor. As long as you were at a power level where YOU can run a master raid, you could get adept weapons. Today the power system completely supplants the "skill" factor of the loot grind. I'm a player who earned Guardian Rank 11 for 8 seasons straight (if I'm remembering correctly the season they came out... I earned GR from release up until I took a break at Edge of Fate). That's not to say I'm more qualified than anyone to speak on this, but the point is that I did endgame content. I routinely ran GMs, Master Dungeons, Master Raids, Lowman raids, etc. Yet when I come back and see how the portal works, I'm forced to go through almost 200 light level of "adept" or even "novice"-equivalent activities before I'm even ALLOWED to run difficult content to get the good gear. The "Grading" system and reward levels is an absolutely worthless system that forces me to run braindead content that is leagues below me for HOURS UPON HOURS UPON HOURS of playtime before I can run what I want to run and get good rewards. AND ON TOP OF IT ALL: Light level basically doesn't even matter anymore. You can't get over-light for an activity anymore. Most if not all activities are hard-set -5/-10/-20 light. My conclusion: There's no point to the light level grind anymore. Remove it entirely, or at least separate it from reward tiers. I want to be able to jump straight back in to GMs without getting hard reset by 300 light "points" every season that force me to play the game on easy mode and only get tier-3 drops when I'm well equipped and able to play the game at master difficulty and go straight to my tier-4/tier-5 drops. Please make game content drop rewards equivalent to the level they are worth, and let players get straight to the difficulty they desire. Reward drops should be based on DIFFICULTY OF CONTENT, not on TIME SPENT GRINDING LIGHT LEVEL. It shouldn't take me 45+ hours in one season just to get to my first tier-5 drop. Stop "making the light grind better", and just scrap it if you want to use this tiered armor system. You can't have both.