You nailed it. It still sucks. Oh, sure, you can exchange an ascendant shard for an ascendant energy (but neither of those are given as drops except in VoG apparently), and you can give up motes and ascendant materials for glimmer, but that's about the silliest thing Bungie has come up with yet. Why would I trade a mote of light (which takes me who-knows-how-long to find) for 250 glimmer, which I can farm in about 6 minutes on Venus? Seriously, Bungie, we need an exchange system for everything that can be collected. If those contrarians out there don't want to have an exchange system, DON'T USE IT. Simple. Let all that stuff accumulate in your vault. Create another character to hold your extra extras. Do whatever you want with it. But for the sane and intelligent who don't want to have a vault filled with 200-stacks of spirit bloom, relic iron, etc, etc, and would like to be able to buy materials that ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE, it would be nice to have a way of exchanging things. For example: I have Iron Banner armour that I'm NOT dismantling, and I've been working on upgrading it since the last Iron Banner. I need 9 shards to reach level 32. But now I can't get any, because they are only available in VoG (and not guaranteed, if I read correctly). So I've got this beautiful piece of armour that I worked very hard for, and it's basically a collector's piece that will end up shelved? Way to punish people for buying the game before House of Wolves came out. Being able to trade 50 relic iron for 5 vanguard marks would be sweet. Or give up 2 motes of light for an ascendant shard. Or ... you get the point. Currently, players have to hope to get the thing they need in a drop. There are some that are guaranteed drops, but these are all at the end of the really hard missions/strikes, which not everyone can do all the time, and they are still not guaranteed. It makes it very frustrating (quote from another thread: "The level 30 I carried through the night fall got etheric light, and I got my fourth Truth. Gaahahhahggarahasggahh!") It would be nice to finish the mission and not worry about the reward. It would be nice to have the option to trade stuff we have lots of for stuff we need. And besides, if this is a world that has ONE remaining city, and guardians are roaming the solar system gathering supplies, wouldn't it makes sense for the vanguard to pay them for their extras? Send out a survey, Bungie. Find out what people want. Find out how best to implement it. Then for the love of sanity, implement it. Please.

Like I stated above, I have no idea how difficult this would be to design and implement, but there are still too many currencies/materials to collect and a market for exchange purposes would be ideal.

Exactly. They started one with some materials, so it's obviously possible. Now it just needs tweaking.