To be fair it's not like they are reinventing the wheel here. EA isn't remaking Madden from the ground-up each year; they add stuff on top of the previous years' work, rip sections of code out to be redone, tweak code here and there, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised nor discouraged if the game is already feature-complete and all EA is doing now is bug-squashing and game balancing. Those two things are half the battle.