Well, at least we finally got the Cody mystery solved... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Sunday, October 02, 2016, 17:08 (2963 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

The reason some people are finding it "harder" than others is because it is completely dependant on RNG. If you have good luck with drops, great! You'll level up fairly quickly. But if you have bad luck, you're fucked and there's nothing you can do about it except grind longer.

Turns out Cody really did level super slowly, and he really does never get Strange Coins or Motes of Light.

Why? because as he admitted last night, he discards all blue engrams, because apparently he thought that Legendary Engrams were all that mattered, despite us repeatedly telling him that Blues help you get higher-light (including Legendaries!), Strange Coins, materials, and Motes.

I nearly gave myself a concussion from facepalming so hard...
So yeah, Cody really did have to grind three times as much as everyone else to get to the same levels... But it was entirely as a result of his own actions.

Activities like IB and Trials will certainly help. It'd be great if there was a similar PvE activity.

Post-patch Archon's Forge is pretty great now in terms of a steady stream of loot (dozens of Blues, Lots of high-light Legendaries from the bosses). I ran it for a bit last night after Trials, and ended up with about two dozen blue engrams (and a handful of Legendaries).

But yeah, Trials drops loot regardless of whether you win or lose (apart from the 5 & 7 drops, and the fact that you can get three Gold packages a day (assuming you run all three characters), for a total of 12 Gold packages each weekend of Trials. It's a TON of loot.

And since we've established that the Raid can be done with 350s in your team (unless you're terrible, like Avateur), and you can get double loot on each encounter (assuming you craft SIVA keys, which are easy to collect), you shouldn't have trouble leveling in PvE. Just gotta man up and do the raid.
(This was our Blind Raid team, and keep in mind that we didn't have Cyber for the final encounter:)