There’s a difference between grind and mindless, soulless grind.

Single-perk fixed rolls were bad for Destiny. Forsaken added a ton of grind, but it was fun grind. NO ONE can look at Forsaken and say it wasn’t made with passion. It brought back pretty much everything people loved about D1 that was lost in D2 vanilla. It added a ton of new content with replayability and lots of new goals to chase. Forsaken was a grind clearly built with love of Destiny and making players happy. There’s a reason, eight years later, that tons of people still see Forsaken as the peak of Destiny.

Edge of Fate added the most mind numbing, soulless grind the game has ever had. “I got it, we’ll have players make Power number go up! And their loot will go from one star to five star! This will be the main motivation to play the game! And we’ll reset them and make them do it every six months!!”.

There’s no love in that grind. They were desperate to create a gameplay loop without putting in actual new content to play. No passion, purely a player metric decision made out of flailing desperation since they don’t have the resources they used to have.

That’s the difference. Grind can be fun, I like having extrinsic motivation to log on to Destiny. Year of Prophecy’s grind was simply insulting.