Back two years ago, Destiny 2 launched and it was a slightly different game than D1 had been. It seemed to be more complete than Destiny 1. Destiny 2 itself introduced EDZ, Titan, Nessus, and Io.  While the original vanilla game of Destiny introduced the Cosmodrome, Moon, Venus, and Mars. To recap, the first game’s campaign was about stopping a looming threat, the Vex and invading the Black Garden.  While the second game’s vanilla campaign was concerned about getting your Light back, saving The Traveller, taking back The Last City and defeating Dominus Gaul.
I am not saying that Destiny 2 is better than the original it was spun off from, but I am saying it feels more complete. Â There are several more hours from the base game not including the first raid, The Leviathan, the location of not only one raid but four in total for the last few years.
The characters themselves feel more fleshed out.  Well aside from your character who has no voice in Destiny 2.  The game itself allows you to make a game-altering decision during one the Final missions of Enemy of My Enemy, a mission on Titan where you can save or kill Mithrax, a Fallen Captain from the House of Kings.  This is an unprecedented decision, it hasn’t before the mission and after.
Rarely in this kind of game do you get to decide what happens to the fate of an NPC which helps you out later on, when he helps you acquire an Exotic after you defeat a literal army.  Also, an interesting bit of lore, if you don’t kill him, he actually spends his life helping Guardians.
To be honest, I would love Bungie to give more missions which allows you to help shape the universe you are playing in; then again, I am one of those 90’s kids that lived off of Choose Your Own Adventures.
One of my favorite things about the original Destiny game was that we had a voice. That we had an opinion about what was going on. Outside of our choice with Mithrax, in the base game, we don’t get any other times where we seem to have any sort of opinion, like we’re less that the guardian where we shoot where we are told to shoot, having little more personality than a toaster. And not the awesome explosions inducing toaster that is the Jötunn.
So to answer the question, which vanilla version of Destiny was better? Neither. They were very different games. Destiny 1 told a story of a newly woken guardian who has to save The Traveler and the world while Destiny 2 is a war story. Though I feel nostalgic for D1, D2 was a good base game to start with and has grown especially since that Bungie is mapping it’s own destiny now.