Bungie did make the road to 600 easier with the prime engram change in the patch notes. The soft cap didn't change but primes will bring people up to 550 faster which is a higher floor for leveling. (Also with the Halloween event which gave a 600 weapon for a few hours of gameplay over 3 weeks).
I assume the Dawning event may have power level boost elements similar to the Halloween event but will see next week.
If bungie makes a similar change to primes when the next season drops, that should hopefully bring people up faster.
That said, I pulled my casual friend who was 529 and hasn't raided since d1y3 into a raid yesterday. We finished up through Riven and he was able to go up to 537 from just raid drops and a single prime. It's a bummer I won't be able to play forge activities with him though, people who just play a few hours here and there will not get to 600 anytime soon.
It didn't take me very long to reach 600, eventhough I only play few hours per week. I usually only do the solo PVE weeklies, and it took me about 1½ months to reach 600 after I had bought Forsaken. That being said, 1½ months of grind to access a bought content would be extremely annoying.
Getting Horror Story helped a lot, although it was a pain in the ass to get the heavy weapon to the same level, as the RNG granted me 600 primaries mostly. I tend to gather bounties, and redeem them after the weekly reset, so I can complete Ikora's and Dreaming City's weeklies in no time. The same goes for the clan bounties, now that they give more solo PVE ones. If they would prevent me from doing that, I'd most likely quit the game.
I really hate the Masterwork Core part of the grind though. I spent all I had, including all the Legendary Shards, to make masterworks of just a single armor set and a couple of weapons. It took three months to gather that amount of them, and now I don't have enough to increase my gear's LL beyond 600.
