Gear ascension worked perfectly fine in HoW, and everybody loved it. There were people going back and replaying (replayability ftw!) old content to get items that they hadn't gotten before because they were useful again. Why would they want to completely undo the only progress they've made so far towards keeping old endgame content relevant? The new HoW endgame weapons also all sucked ass, PoE was boring af, and the new exotics and elemental primaries couldn't be obtained except by playing boring af PoE. None of this was too big of a deal, since old gear could be ascended to be usable, but that's not going to happen this time around. We could very easily end up with HoW level shitgear, and this time we won't be able to ascend other gear to use instead.