Philosophically, I agree with everything you just said...I have been calling for the same return of Fair Play settings online pretty much since they took them out...but sadly, giving players the option to play cheesy and utilize cheap tactics is not enough in their eyes...they don't want to play the game the way they want...they want to play the game the way they want AND they want everyone else to "validate" them by being able to do so in the same regular ranked games as everyone else. There will always be a small percentage of people who actually don't give a damn whatsoever about HOW they "win" and much as IF they "win"...
Its that small distinction that ensures online play will ALWAYS have people that ruin the experience for strangers and think they are perfectly justified in doing so...not a Madden-centric phenomena though by any stretch of the imagination. COD, BF, Halo...all have brigades of morons who team kill, exploit and out-and-out cheat in order to "win"...the really sad thing is that the artificial "result" means more to this kind of player than the overall "experience".
Fair Play rules forced people to play "football" more than "Madden"...and the vocal nature of that type of person won the day.
I really liked the NCAA approach a couple year's back that assigned points - or took away points - for specific actions like punting, kicking FGs or running up scores...Madden should have been ahead of them on that count and instead they still don't have anything even close to that.
Another thing that would help a little is separate servers for simulation style and freestyle players, but in the end, there would still be people who would intentionally go into simulation style games and utilize exploits and cheats anyway...sad but true for all of us. The only fool-proof way to avoid the idiot brigade is to play with a league or friends or like-minded players...anything else is Russian Roulette...