For me, the old mode was incredibly stale. The new one is far from perfect, but at least it has
life in it. The computer will make trades with other computer controlled teams, and offer you trades. It will make roster moves based on position battles. For example, in just one season I saw the Chargers move from Ryan Matthews to Danny Wood head in the first quarter of the season, and then back to Matthews in the last quarter of the season because it was not happy with the production of either.
There is a twitter feed and a news feed that keeps the franchise feeling alive. You have story lines for some rookies. Just like in real life, we don't hear about all of the rookies all of the time. You have to be a draft/NCAA junkie to know about all kinds of incoming rookies.
These simple things alone make Madden 25 far superior to 12 in my opinion. Add in the annoying undrafted free agents from M12, and that the only way to have any form of realstic roster moves in Madden 12 is to have a 32 team franchise. The default logic of Madden 12 is to treat every team like a 4-3 defense. They want like 5 DT's and only 2 MLBs, and if you have two good MLB's, they cut the one with the lower OVR, ro at least don't resign them despite when you go
in game to play that team, they still have a 3-4 playbook and a terrible roster. I read people say "oh, it doesn't take that long." Yes... yes it does. It takes forever. It's mind numbing. I want to play football.
I will be the first to admit that I LOVE custom play books and probably spend as much time or more in practice mode messing around with my play book trying to make tweaks here and there. That is time consuming, but at least I am doing football stuff and not micro managing 32 teams. If you like 12, then great. If was the best of the group of 09, 10, 11, and 12. I never played 13, but that was because it looked more like an alpha build for 25 than a finished game. By that standard, I stuck with 12... but now that 25 is out, I haven't looked back.
... I still think that APF2k8 is a better football game, but M25 is the best madden I have played on the whole.