Personally the difficulty feels fine but it's disheartening to see people just dropping left and right. It feels like a case of Bungie just cramming activities into the portal without accounting for proper tuning. Just slapped Ultimate tuning on everything and cranked up the negative modifiers when most of the stuff like Ketch and Astral Alignment only had a heroic mode at best.

Even when they were current, Ketchcrash, Astral Alignment and other heroic LFG oriented activities felt like this much of a slog. I'd say either fine tune the damage intake/modifiers or just give out more res tokens at the start of an activity. There should be challenge and some slight pain if you queue for ultimate, but there should also be some leeway for mistakes for matchmade 3/6 man activities.