Are you suggesting that Madden NFL is not designed with the NFL experience in mind? I beg to differ.
I assume you are concluding this presumably because I have the audacity to say "XP-based gameplay loops are good game design and I have 40 years of video game history backing me up" is presumptuous. The concept of football isn't special enough to require an alternative core game loop.
Both the designers and Tiburon and I - they moreso than I by virtue of having many years of experience up on me - have opinions informed by careers built in the video game industry. If you from your position without this experience think those informed opinions are twisted and backwards, feel free to make your own game and prove the entire industry wrong. You'll make yourself a multi-millionaire if you succeed.
Video games, even sports video games, aren't designed to only appeal to the hardest of the hardcore. AAA video games in the general case don't survive unless they grow their audience.
Madden is not immune from this. In order for franchise mode to survive and thrive, in order for it to continue to see dev time to get to the depth this community wants, it needs ensure it can grow its audience. That means designing the mode to engage users who previously haven't played it, be it for prior lack of knowledge of how to play, lack of interest, intimidation by the many walls-of-text the mode previously threw at the player, and so on.
Look at all the features added into franchise for Madden 17 and you will clearly see a theme of opening the mode up to more users with less knowledge. The core mechanics engage these new users with football-agnostic game mechanics backed by 40 years of video game history, game mechanics which don't require football knowledge to understand. Over the course of time the game feeds users the football knowledge they need to succeed in the football-specific components of the game. You also see a theme of providing users the tools and information they need to make relevant franchise gameplay decisions faster and more decisively - be it injury returns, contracts, what have you - and also ensuring the user always has a reason to engage with the mode each week of his team's season, so he keeps booting up the game to play.
Franchise mode is not a sacred ground for sim players only, and it is not a mode which should only ever cater to sim players' interests. That's an incredibly selfish attitude towards game design and it's also a position which isn't commercially viable. If you want to make a successful video game, you need to make a game which
other people want to play, not just what you want to play. I know this, and I've very clearly illustrated that Tiburon also knows this. Feel free to suggest that Tiburon growing the total audience for their game and making a more successful and more well-rounded product is a bad idea, though.