Looter shooters are a dying breed in the current landscape. Destiny has evolved past the genre and become a collection and build crafting game. That's where and why crafting is such a hot topic.

Crafting is the implementation of a game direction. Before 2022, destiny was a looter shooter, but towards the end of that time, looter shooters started going out of style. Today, we see a pretty good looter in first descendant, and that's turned into a ghost town already as a truly free to play game. So many "Destiny Killers" have come and gone, all trying to be looter shooters and having no ability to stay competitive. Warframe is the only good looter that I can think of which is an outlier in the genre.

Since the game added crafting and created light subclasses 3.0, it became a game about build crafting. It was designed around you getting all these fun guns and abilities. With some grinding, you could have a TON of flexibility in how you configured your guardian into the ultimate alien killing machine. Some in the community enjoyed this pivot. I am among them. You could grind a bit and get patterns for most guns you wanted (seasonal, being limited amount of time) and get exactly what you wanted. This is a key step in the ultimate build crafting game: having everything you want and optimizing for exactly that.

People who don't like crafting are very much still in love with the looter shooter genre. They want it to take a very long time to get exactly what you want because that keeps them playing. They are more likely to quit or be unhappy once they have all the tools that make their build perfect, because then there's nothing left to chase. They are driven by that treadmill of playing to chase the next piece gear as opposed to being able to use that next piece of gear.

;TLDR

The crafting debate is about whether players want destiny to be a build crafting and collection game or a looter. It's not about whether a handful of seasonal weapons are craftable.