Love your response, I do the exact same thing. Online franchise is really the only thing that interests me, having a group of friends building, trading, to win the league is awesome. Can't play online H2H cause more than half the time other player is cheesing so that's no fun.
With the reports from the NHL developmental team saying "Online GM Mode is the least played mode" it's because it's garbage, NHL doesn't even have Fantasy Draft that you can control just sim, so may different features that have in regular GM. The NHL team better be working hard on Online Franchise as well as EASHL as they do on HUT.
Madden even with all its flaws has a pretty good online franchise; needs improvements but so does every other game, it has everything you pretty much need other than being more in depth, real rookie draft which don't know about licencing very smart to both online and offline together. If you build a quality game mode players will come.