Growing up I spent far too much time playing Halo and World of Warcraft and I feel like Destiny has exactly the right amount of depth.

For me at least, the gunplay is unparalleled. I really enjoy the world that Bungie has built even if the main story line in both D1 and D2 was somewhat lackluster and I love trying to find all the little secrets that they've hidden around. I also really love seeing what each new exotic I get does and testing it out to see if I could make a load out that would play to its strengths.

I think you've definitely got different expectations for Destiny than what Bungie does. Destiny has never been and never will be an MMORPG. If it is anything, it is an FPS with MMO/RPG like features. I've seen the term MMO-Lite thrown around and I think that also fits the bill. The game is about finding/gathering loot to fit your play style. At the end of the day, there are really only 3 or 4 major end-game activities. The two primary ones are the competitive multiplayer mode that happens every weekend (it used to be called Trials of Osiris, now its Trials of the Nine) and the PvE raid. Roughly once a month in Destiny 1 they also had a dedicated week of PvP activities called Iron Banner, which makes your Power Level matter in PvP. There were sometime random PvE events you could take part in as well, but for the most part all you're going to have to do after you reach max Power level is the raid, trials, and Iron Banner. If that doesn't sound fun to you - Destiny is not the game for you and its not trying to be. The depth comes from figuring out how to adapt your play style to the challenges you face in each of those modes. My friends and I used to do Trials every weekend and we tried out a bunch of different loadouts of weapons and armor and combinations of subclasses to see which one gave us the most synergy. We also ran the raid like crazy, looking for secret chests and trying to fine tune our boss strats.

It also sounds like you got to end-game and didn't look at any of the gear you picked up beyond the Power level. Stats for each item aren't as obvious as WoW, but the perks and inherent stats on the gear do matter. A lot of it can feel same-ish because the Armor only has 3 stats on it, but it the depth in gear boils down to those stats. I will agree with you that the RPG aspects (specically the subclass "skill" trees) definitely aren't as in-depth as they could be. I think it would be way cooler if we could have an actual skill tree, but I don't think that would make the game any deeper. There would just end up being cookie cutter builds and people would never use some of the options. That is exactly what happened in Destiny 1 and basically every MMO.