I hated the ascendant shards too, just keep the traditional skill trees to upgrade your armour and weapons. Loved it that way, and I just dislike this whole light thing. I mean you could put it back to a stat on gear but I don't want it being anything more to do with levelling. Its just stupid. Keep your actual character level.

Rework the currency back to vangaurd marks and crucible marks. Add faction marks. Faction marks are rewarded in faction rank up packages. The cryptarch engrams are purchased with glimmer and one of the five faction marks giving you gear related to the faction your currency was from. That gear drops no lower than your current light level. Add an armor smith and give the armor and weapon smith the ability to infuse your gear to the maximum light level one point at a time using glimmer, faction marks, ascendant materials, radiant materials, etheric light, and moldering shards as part of the cost. The higher the light gets on an item the higher the cost to infuse it to the next level (only works on year 2 items that have the infusion slot). The smiths should be able to modify our weapons and armor using parts we have collected from other gear (we choose what to keep when dismantling items). This would make year 1 content relevant, but keep us using year 2 gear, give us more to do during the week, give us an alternate avenue of leveling up in case we don't get what we need this week and still incentivize raid and nightfall activities as these are the best activities for higher level gear.