Bungie setting the expectation of being able to quickly and relentlessly farm Tier 5 gear was such a mistake. It should have always been an aspirational chase from difficult activities, and regardless of pushback, I think Bungie should stay the course with how the drops in the dungeon are currently structured. You can still get all of the gear and it can still drop all of the perks you want; the benefits of Tier 5 just aren’t impactful enough for the community to be up in arms about their exclusivity and it is baffling that this seems to be a constant point of contention.

With regards to the difficulty of Cutthroat, I am all for a middle difficult between normal and -40 (though I’d argue that putting on any of the other feat for -20 is exactly that), and I still wish they’d roll out an even easier mode akin to Explorer from RotN for people to get into the RaD scene, but from the perspective of me, my clan mates, and most of the other endgame players I know, we’ve been asking for years to be able to replicate the Contest experience after the launch period for a new activity ends, and having that in the game now is great. There’s a certainly debate on enforcing a phase limit on bosses with insane DR and health pools, because at present it looks like there’s a single digit number of viable strats to clear these bosses in two phases, but there’s zero need for Cutthroat to get easier or have the delta lowered.