You're right, this in particular is not a white lie, this is now flat-out false.
Tiburon has released no fewer than
nine title updates for Madden NFL 16 - unprecedented in the AAA sports gaming space. Two of these updates have added new ways to play the game in Draft Champions Play A Friend and MUT Salary Cap Ranked, and one added much-clamored for options for hardcore players in XP sliders for Connected Franchise. This is also unprecedented as no other major sports game is adding entire game modes post-launch. Heck, not many other video games period are doing this. And actually, Madden Ultimate Team was introduced the same way - a free post-release patch - in Madden NFL 10, so really Tiburon's only precedent is their own history with the Madden NFL series which people are accusing them of putting low effort into.
Anecdotally we also know that Tiburon has doubled the size of their dev team over the past several years, and when NCAA Football was put on the shelf many of those assigned to that series were brought into the Madden fold rather than let go outright.
The idea that Tiburon has "stepped off the gas" doesn't match the amount of resources they are putting back into the series. This effort is evident in the ascending quality of the game over the past several years, both critically in the mainstream (Metacritic scores, etc.), the perception of the game on the careful and detail-oriented critical eye that is this website, and also with the amount of effort they continue to put into Madden 16 post-launch.
If you want to look at a sports game series that's
actually complacent, that's
actually low-effort, look at the WWE 2K series, whose yearly efforts compared to what Madden and literally every other major sports game has accomplished over the past several years (besides maybe the RBI Baseball re-make) have been pretty laughable, especially with respect to post-release support where Madden is currently running laps around most of the competition.
Does everything they do for Madden align with what OS wants? Obviously that's not the case. They have many interest groups to cater to. Do they always succeed with what they set out to do? They have a better track record now than in the past, but also obviously there are things to improve. But let's be real here when evaluating the effort level, especially the
current effort level.