While I don't know that hiding ratings is really lazy I wouldn't say that nothing within their development is. For instance the way that they implemented the potential rating.
Last year in head coach they implemented it by having a potential for each indivudual attribute so there could be differences to how each player would develop as well as being able to differentiate between players who could swith positions and those who couldn't.
However, this year in madden the potential rating was just assigned as a single number limiting overall. This led to a lot less potential to differentiate players as well as a lot of glitchy wierd things caused when changing positions. I personally see no benifit to programming potential in this way other than that it is slightly easier as it makes less ratings to rate and there are several pretty serious disadvantages to this system. I consider choosing the slightly easier but obviously much less benifitial method to be lazyness.