I agree - I mean there is a balance required, but no matter what ratings you give a created player in Madden - you can't recreate Barry Sanders - or even anything close.
Part of it is the control layout and part of it is portions of the "sim" crowd that have no idea how fast, quick, and sudden the game really is. You can't begin to fathom the speed of the NFL on TV. You can't even really get it at the stadium until you get close - and then it blows your mind.
The left stick is under utilized - how far forward you press the stick should be much more sensitive in the way the game reads it and should impact your speed with greater variety, quick flicks in any direction should be hard cuts, quick flick down and immediately back up should be the "dead leg/hesitation move" from "precision modifier". Quickly moving the stick down and holding for a moment should be the "back juke" to run backwards you should have to turn left or right and keep on going to down (think spin move on R Stick except you continue to hold down at the end) I miss right stick down being high knees kind of deal. I miss the directional quick cuts. They need to factor in a player's balance in their AGI rating so less RBs fall over when running into backside of OL players.
They need to bring back the "timing/pressure sensitive" variations for all the moves - and don't tell me it won't work cuz I have no issue throwing lobs, bullets and variations in between. This way the user has control of the animation attempted - not over ride the ratings, as they would still determine the success/fail of the attempt - but give me back the feeling of control that those variable inputs allowed in Madden's past.
It seems to me that the ratings are there to determine how quickly a player can cut, then regain speed, if a defender falls for the move or not, and so on. So why do we not have the ability to determine what style of animations play out by our input to the controller???
For the record, I am by far more sim minded than not, but if I don't have control over the player I have and what he
attempts to do - I might as well coach mode - in which case I might as well save the 60 dollars...