The "Featured Gear" debacle is a result of Bungie's lack of confidence in their own creation. They want to see people who are using the "new stuff" that they made instead of the old stuff, but they don't know how to get people to want to use it without powercreeping it. Their solution is "temporary powercreep." Featured Gear, New Gear Bonuses, New Gear Mods... these are all things that expire/rotate so they can make the new stuff inherently better without continually increasing the relative power in the sandbox. I mean, just look at the brand new weapon type, the Heavy Crossbow: it's really bad at everything other than ammo economy; the Temporal Blast mod is carrying it for boss DPS. If that mod didn't exist, Bungie is convinced that no one would care about the weapon or want to use it. This is likely going to result in fewer buffs down the line, too. When you can hide an underperformer like the Heavy Crossbow behind a bunch of New Gear boosts and Volatile Mods, what incentive do you have to buff it? This comes double once that gear stops being "new," and the next group move in, get the boost and mods and take their place in your loadout. Even if they buffed the old stuff, they're still weaker thanks to NG bonuses so people won't use it anyway. tl;dr: Bungie uses this system because they're not confident in their design, they're unable to cope with people not using things that aren't powercrept, unable to make things interesting without powercreep, and don't want to spend dev time buffing underperformers. It needs to go.