Another reason to grind public events, you get a shit load of planet tokens and you can turn them in, 20 at a time gives you a purple engram which you can dismantle. 20-30 shards is pretty cheap thought it might go up to 100.
If you do feel that you are cock blocked by your light level, roll an alt. These are the following power engrams you can do each week without much trouble once you hit 20, each one is gonna drop 10-15 light levels above your current max (on that char) so you can rise up pretty fast. Today morning I started doing some of them on my titan and I went from 273 to 285 base (blue drops) in ~2 hours:
Crucible call to arms weekly (~6-8 games)
Nightfall weekly
Flashpoint Public events (1 rando planet picked each week, do a couple of PE's get a power engram)
earn clan XP
2-4x clan engrams (nightfall, crucible, trials, raid)
and of course doing the exotic quests once will drop them at +15 light levels, 4 weapons and those help a lot as will any exotic engrams you get from heroic public events, i've seen 5 drop in ~100 PEs. I haven't stepped into the raid and feel like I could spend all week just doing these power engram grinds on 3 chars and you'll slowly make your way to 305 (310?) without ever raiding, which is kinda weird but nice I guess.
Trials is live anyways, it seems you must complete the call to arms PVP weekly quest at least once to do it which is throwing off a lot of streamers.