No they're not the cause, but a product of the vanilla destiny encounter design choices. They were designed around such encounters and tuned for that. With year two bungie is trying to improve both their encounter and weapon design to be more enjoyable and unfortunately as the current year 1 raid guns stand many of them would need a redesign from what they currently are to avoid gimping them so they don't overpower content. I know destiny isn't an MMO, but it's the first really successfully persistent world fps/rpg hybrid and it's obviously gone through a serious amount of teething. It's not perfect by a very long shot but to rectify bad design choices and improve long term enjoyment of the game there are some things that shouldn't be brought forward because they don't belong in the now slightly more defined design ethos Bungie has worked out for themselves. I think that allowing etheric light to ascend old gear was a bad idea, as the current poe weapon rewards themselves are by no means objectively bad but have seen next to no use because compared to some of the brute force perks on earlier stuff(ie firefly on a handcannon, really?) they just don't cut it. Having more nuanced perks as seen with the poe weapons and armor is actually beneficial for the game's variety and choice. In the end it's just my opinion but really I would welcome the change as a new beginning from Bungie, because clearly over the past 2 content patches they have been trying to work out how to manage a persistent world game. Hopefully they work out that much more frequent balance patches are needed (ala MMORPGs /MOBAS) to prevent stale pve / pvp metagames. I don't want to see a situation where 1 exotic is the best for almost a year(looking at you gjallarhorn) or a raid weapon is top 3 non exotic primary for current content throughout a whole year cycle (ie voc, fatebringer). Not bringing the last years guns through allows bungie to be really experimental with fun and different perks and just not bring forward a lot of flat out damage/performance/stat perks.