I agree that there has to be some nuance to it, but as an example consider how baseball games handle hitting. Typically the batter is human controlled in baseball games, and baseball is a sport where even the best players fail to get on base about 3/5s (60%) of the time, or fail to get a hit 2/3 (66%) of the time. In baseball videogames, there's still usually an edge to the player (other than if you're like me and totally suck at
The Show in which case you go 1/20 routinely), but even while the player can perfectly time reading pitches, swing at just the right time, and really learn the nuances of the game, ultimately, most players in the game end up matching their real life counter-parts to some degree. Maybe everythings slightly inflated, so your .240 2nd baseman in real life might be a .265 in the game, and your .320 slugger might be .350 or something, but the idea is that it's still relatively close to reality. Great hitters in real life are typically great hitters in the game, guys who manufacture runs with slap singles and small ball are best used in that way in the game. Counter this to Madden where Christian Hackenberg is as likely to pick you apart as Tom Brady is, or DeShaun Kizer is as likely to throw 40-yard dimes as Matt Ryan is.
Baseball is really tough to get right. For instance, a batter's eye is one of the most important factors of how good the batter will be. Many famous baseball players, like Jim Rice, lost their vision later in their careers and couldn't detect pitches anymore. And, obviously, the player is looking at a TV screen in a baseball game, and yet, despite all of this nuance in the pitcher v. batter relationship, baseball videogames have replicated hit accuracy
fairly well... Not perfect of course, but much better than how Madden handles QB accuracy.
So, likewise, you'll never truly get a perfect simulation, elsewise we'd just play Front Office Football and let the stats play out for themselves, but right now, they're so far from simulation with how QB's play it's an insult to calling it a "simulation mode." You should feel the pain of not having a good QB... If Christian Hackenberg is your QB, you should have to change your gameplan to be competitive. But, as it is now, you really don't have to. The next step after that is to advance the AI so that they can identify your player's weaknesses and attack that... As it is today, the CPU defense plays the same way whether you're Derek Carr or Connor Cook, and we obviously know that's not how NFL defenses work.
That is a much harder thing for EA to accomplish so I don't really fault them as much, and also because it's important to just get that first step figured out. First, make CPU QBs play more realistically to their attributes, second make human QBs play more realistically but it's okay if there's some control given to the human because that's tough to avoid.