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The progression system could use improvement, but having players' year-to-year progression reflect their previous season is not the answer and doesn't make sense if you think about it a little more. You're trying to compare two separate things here that have a fundamentally different logic behind them.

All these changes in players' ratings from update-to-update is not player progression. When a breakout star like Arian Foster sees a huge ratings jump between updates, it's not because the developers think he improved by that much, it's because they think the past rating was plain wrong.

Think of the initial rating given to all players as the developers best guess at how well a player is capable of performing. They don't know for sure how good a year any player is going to have, so they make a prediction using the only real resource they have: past performances. And they're often wrong in their ratings because the NFL is hard to predict, so they change the ratings accordingly in an attempt to accurately reflect how well each player is capable of performing.

This doesn't happen in Franchise mode, which is why your Cedric Benson shouldn't see a big ratings improvement for having a good season in your Franchise. There are no "wrong" ratings in Franchise mode; when you start the Franchise, it takes whatever roster you have at the moment and treats all the ratings on there as infallible. Your players will perform as their ratings allow them to. Your Cedric Benson had a great year and easily outperformed what his ratings would suggest, but he still accumulated every single yard based on his ratings. There's no "adjustment" needed to his ratings like a real life breakout star, so in the offseason he shouldn't see a huge jump in his ratings but instead see player progression.

The player progression system in Madden plays it pretty safe. Players improve rapidly their first two years in the league, see a slight improvement over the next few years and then stay steady, and then start declining around age 29. Everybody more or less follows the same model.

Personally I'd like to see a little more randomness in progression so we do have breakout stars. It'd work in the opposite order of what you want with your Cedric Benson though; a random player would see a big unexpected improvement in their ratings and then have like 1800 rushing yards the following year.

tl;dr: The change in ratings for a player after a real-life breakout season is NOT intended to represent "progression" so you cannot apply this to your Franchise players.