My son and I also tested this at mid level. No Storms, he was using his Ranger, I was either Colossus or Interceptor. We would intentionally mix gear scores, raising and lowering and mismatching each other by adding or removing the good bits, even have some of the early drop Legendaries, and of course the starter weapons. Then we’d test in Freeplay or a mission run (private to just us two).
You can tell, but not by much when we were controlling the mix.
After 1.0.3 though Freeplay does suddenly get much easier, even for us, when a well geared L30 drops in. The addition of that range scales us heavily. And it isn’t the 30 is killing for us, you see your own numbers change from before on bosses. This is different from before when we’d suddenly be one shotted when L30 dropped in. So better, but maybe too dramatic.
I think it is going in the right direction (and I say this from GW2 where I think the scaling works well), but clearly needs more tuning to give it a good feel. How hard that will be for them with what @KevinC says, I have no clue.