Yes...and no. While the item lore can seem "self-contained" various items often relate to each other. And, if I'm not mistaken, these are the same people behind the Grimoire of the first game. Taken King alone added 50 individual contributions to one singular story that, if given the breath of life in the form of cinematics, voice acting, etc., would easily quintuple that of the entire franchise to date. Imagine if the few hundred other Grimoire cards were translated into actual in-game experiences? And even without a "lore tab" every piece of equipment has come with a tiny glimpse into the world of Destiny and the history of that universe, begging questions the answers to would provide months, if not years of content in a franchise where currently the lack of good storytelling is among THE top complaints dating back to the beginning, and a complaint I only see being repeated more and more as Bungie announced they are departing from "traditional DLC" and, moe specifically, stating they have no plans for "campaigns" (read: "actual story") in the future, at least for the duration of this "annual pass" nonsense.

I take it you've never read a book that was adapted into a movie.

I spent roughly an hour and a half watching Eragon and the next 18 hours pointing out every inaccuracy, shortcoming, botched scene, misrepresented character, and outright omission. Does that answer your presumptuous assertion? What you have failed to account for is we are neither talking about a book, nor a movie, but rather a video game. Even the SNES version of Lord of the Rings trumped Peter Jackson's acclaimed venture into Middle Earth if for no othe reason than the inclusion of Tom Bombadil and Old Man Willow (albeit the scene had to be tweaked to fit with the game's mechanics). But that's a foible Destiny would be immune to, as it is NOT a game based on a book, or a comic series, or a TV series, or a movie, or any other established story and universe. Aside for the planets and moons being recognizable as existing in our solar system (and thus should at least partially reflect their real-world counterparts) this is an entirely blank slate. So whether the story is told in Grimoire and Lore Tabs or by actually being acted out and performed through cinematics, nothing is "lost" IF they actually put it in the game. Right now, to use your analogy of book to movie adaptations, Destiny is worse than the Eragon movie in terms of what was written and what was let out. And bear in mind I'm saying this knowing Eragon left out the entire Dwarven (and possibly even Elven) races. To draw a comparison of Destiny vs the Grimoire to the Eragon movie vs the book, it would be like if Brom, Galbatorix, Arya, Sapphira, Rowan, Murtag, and Eragon himself were left out of the movie and instead it focused on some random town guard walking by Angela's alchemy shop.

Let's not talk about the Eragon movie. 💩

The point here is not the cost, or hoe hard is it. The point is that the people who are keeping up the lore tabs are seemingly much better at what their other colleagues can do. Also all the stories in Destiny 2 are basically a paragraph long. "Evil space conqueror race enslaves your source of power, making you lose it. After regaining your power and friends you start progressing a plan to defeat said enemy" "Race of space robots captures a simulation system, to find the best tactic to strip the universe to their liking, the hero plans to stop that with a legendary friend" Etc. You know.

You're comparing apples to orange is my point. Of course it easy to stay compelling when you're only asking for two minutes of the player's time. To make a comparison to another medium there have been amazing screenplays that have been made into terrible movies. That's because different mediums have different needs. You can't go from Word to Video and expect nothing to need alteration. The same is true for Games except that games are significantly more complex than a movie.

Yes it is true that it is ridiculously harder to just write a small story than to make it into an adventure mission so to say. But still, all of these tabs with wonderful flavor and characterization are left hidden, when the writers seem to be more than capable of writing compelling characters but seem to be kept aside when it comes to the stuff that shows. Also seeing the budget and production quality of Destiny, I don't see a barrier holding the writing back on that end. I just feel like the problem is not that if they can, but are they even given the room to use their vision.

Not to say you are objectively wrong, but you don't seem to really understand just how much medium matters. And furthermore where are you getting the assumption that these are even different writers in the first place?

Saying that all the stories in the game are a paragraph long because you can summarise them like that makes no sense. You ever read the back of a book? Because your comment here suggests that you haven’t.