I haven't listened to this yet but my stance on sim vs. casual is this - both crowds can be pleased, that's why we have sliders. I've brought up the same point in the NHL forums for years so I'll keep this short.
EA is a business whose primary goal is to make money. They make more money by marketing this game to the casual football fan who wants to see sweet one-hand catches in double coverage and huge hits than to the hardcore fan who wants offensive line injuries and knows the difference between the A gap and the B gap. There are simply more casual gamers in existence than hardcore gamers, and this applies to every video game out there. The company making the game will simply make more sales by appealing to a wider audience than the niche hardcore fans.
However, by having sliders, we are able to tweak the game to our liking (for the most part). You also have to remember that most of us here are of the hardcore variety. So while the majority of people here might have gripes about certain aspects of the game, we are still the minority overall.
Wrapping this up, I like to think that most of the devs are more like us than they are the casual fans. As apparently alluded to in the podcast, the executives/marketing team make the majority of the decisions to influence the final product, which makes sense from a financial perspective. The silver lining to this is as the product makes more sales, they can have more people working on the game overall. Even if they spend 80% working on solely online features, they're still spending 20% of their time working on offline features for us hardcore fans.
With that said, I'm really happy with where we're at in gaming. I haven't played it very much the last 5 years or so, but Madden is the best it's ever been. NHL is by far the best it's ever been. Plenty of good games to keep me occupied and having fun for a long time
