Red Border Drop Protection among other suggestions for crafting...

While I personally can't say crafting has "ruined the game/grind" for me, I do find it important to state the current iteration of crafting while better than at WQ launch is still quite annoying to engage with actively, while ultimately feeling more serviceable when playing passively/casually.

Actively grinding activities and not valuing the players time on the path toward crafting at least one of the growing catalogue of craftable weapons, feels cheap when the only response is to "wait til the season is almost over, buy all the upgrades and just log in every tuesday to turn in your chucky cheese tokens for free reds". On top of this is the looming reality that once Lightfall releases, it is safe to assume that the crafting path for many of these seasonal craftable weapons may be unavailable or gated for months at a time.

A very simply thought out solution that both makes normal drops somewhat worth your time to farm & grants you a guaranteed path toward reds that isn't gated weekly is some bad luck protection for red borders. This currently has some life in wellspring to my knowledge, where after a certain number of clears you are guaranteed the daily rotated weapon as a red border. What needs to happen for craftable weapons is to expand this idea for each one, such that after x drops of y craftable weapon, you will be guaranteed a red border.

It's my belief that drop protection in several key areas of the game (across the whole game and not relegated to specific sets of weapons and activities) would provide massive benefits to replay ability for activities.

In general the idea of bad luck protection isn't talked much save for a couple instances where the community has begged Bungie to add it, such as in cases for older raid exotics. What's weirder to me is that newer raids (to Destiny 2) don't seem to keep the tradition as far as I am aware. I'd personally like to know the team's thoughts and reasonings behind not adding drop protection to more areas of the game. Some sort of dupe protection for pinnacle slots is one common suggestion from players as currently many players have been fed up with the power level system due to issues such as this.

A couple other minor issues I have with crafting are swapping out perk costs and the leveling process for a freshly crafted weapon.

• Swapping around perks should at least cost less or be unlocked once you make the first purchase, given how much materials it would take to do that in the first place, it would be a valuable QoL change.
• Weapon leveling needs a bit of a facelift, either the levels btw you earn all the perks should be lowered so that it takes less levels to be able to unlock all the perks or leveling up weapons should be faster in general for different endgame activities.