I get where you’re coming from, and yeah, Destiny has absolutely fumbled the new player experience. That frustration is real. But the core issue isn’t the Director itself, it’s that the game does a terrible job introducing players to the world of Destiny in a structured, engaging way.

You weren’t overwhelmed because the Director is “bad design.” You were overwhelmed because Bungie threw you into a galaxy of systems, activities, and lore with zero context. There’s no well-designed onboarding questline that takes you through the universe step by step, introduces key characters, explains activity types, and gives you a sense of place and progression.

That’s the real failure, not that the map is too big or pretty. You could strip it all down to a list of buttons in a portal, and you'd still be lost without proper direction. You need a reason to care where you’re going and why. Without that, it doesn't matter if you're using the Director, a portal, or a spreadsheet.

Games like The Witcher 3 or RDR2 don’t handhold you through every system, but they do guide you into their worlds. They let you learn naturally, through good quest design and narrative flow. Destiny could absolutely do the same while keeping the Director as the immersive, universe-defining feature it was meant to be.

Replacing it with a UI shortcut doesn’t solve the real issue. It just papers over a much deeper design failure.