They wouldn't have to design more powerful gear though. They'd just have to design gear which is on the same level. Give tactical choices, personal preferences etc. but instead, for whatever reason, Bungie have decided to have a steady decline quality for whatever reason... But you can't deny that at one point at least the Vex Mythoclast was one of the best weapons in the game, justifying it's hard to gain status, then Necrochasm is even harder to get, and is a pile of shit. This means the only reason people use the worse weapons is because Bungie have arbitrarily increased the numbers associated with it. The new weapons (with a few exceptions, e.g. Matador/Party Crasher etc.) mostly were such an anticlimax there was little to get excited over, as the new gear sucking made old grinds even harder as Nightfalls had their level raised.

And this all touches on the problem in that with Destiny, to get the very best gear you have to already be able to complete the very hardest content on the hardest difficulty... So what's the new gear useful for? Only for making stuff you already can do, easier, so you can go back and grind for all the gear. But if you already have plenty of good gear, what's the point in going back? Bungie have realised that if people continue to use the old gear, they'll be less likely to massively grind TTK, sort of like how because we could ascend VoG weapons, people quickly got bored of PoE, simply because it sucked. There was no loot reason encouraging us to play shit content like we did with CE> Now everything will suck, they hope to activate the compulsive triggers in our brains which even led to some players deleting and grinding chars to L20 during TDB simply to grind for more ascendant mats each week. Personally, I don't see it happening, this just seems like it's discarding past effort too easily. I know it makes little difference in the grand scheme of things, but I feel much better if say, I have a weapon/armour piece I love, and I can put extra care and effort into upgrading it, than it does to have that made redundant so I have to throw it away and put the same care and effort into finding something new that I don't have the connection with. I know the outcome is about the same, but every time I discard something I worked so hard for, it makes me feel like all that effort has now been wasted and I may as well have not bothered.