so my iron banana week: hit rank 5 on my titan yesterday, playing probably 1-2 hours or so every day. I'd stop once I finished the 3 daily bounties and was close to the next level. I hit rank 5 on my warlock and hunter today as well, didn't play them at all during the week but would collect the daily bounties so saturday when I did play I was able to get like 9 iron bounties done in a few games, turn them all in, and that got me 3-4 levels just from that - with Y1 class item, Y2 shader, and Y2 emblem. I only turned in the weekly bounties on my titan, I still have them on my hunter/warlock for next time turn in. They give ridiculous amounts of rep if you wait until the end, I think I was getting like 1800 per on my titan and would probably get close to 3k per on my alts if I waited till monday to turn them in.
I bought all the items I could. Only had 1 drop across all 3 chars, the sidearm. Saw other people get the boots, primary, and class item but extremely rare - out of maybe 40 games I saw maybe... 6 drops total? The loot rate is a total joke, and it sucks they are so stingy with what items you can get.
This was all solo queuing too, never did it with a fireteam/group. I quit out of a game once we were losing by more than 2k early on, unless I was going for heavy/super bounties. You have to stop caring whether teammates cap points or not, thats the one thing that can drive you crazy - how many people just are so ignorant of how the control mechanics work. I found the best time to play during the morning, probably closer to 50% win/loss vs evenings where it was closer to 90% loss and a lot of stacked fireteams vs 6 solo queuers.
all in all iron banana sucks, if the glitch works next time I'll just buy whatever's for sale and not even bother playing. Still, getting one character to rank 5 is pretty easy as a solo player, about 20-30 hours of PVPing, and after that your second and third character are extremely fast - like 5-8 hours each. If you save your weekly bounties for next time, and that works, it'll probably be even faster.