I had my friends M18 for 3 solid days and logged about 8 hours with the game so I do feel qualified - as someone who has purchased every version at retail since 2003 until M15 - to share my opinions.
To be frank, as an offline franchise player, I do not trust EA and this dev crew to make the game that I want so before I drop 60 bones I want to try the game. I was super excited at the direction of the game with M12 and have been underwhelmed to flat out disappointed each year since.
I understand that the devs serve many masters with MUT, arcade, online play and of course arm chair GMs like myself. The game is beautiful, that is clear and the longshot story telling is another new direction they wanted to take that leaves franchise lovers wanting.
Many are calling for a full re-write of CFM and while I agree I know that simply is not anywhere near the top of their priority list. What I cannot understand is why they cannot throw us a bone with some low resource enhancements like editing draft classes, better CPUVCPU logic and improved draft/fa/pre/post immersion.
I work in software development and I certainly understand that little enhancements have larger downstream impacts depending upon the way the game was coded. But while presentation work is resource intensive, adding draft class edits and improving CPU/CPU logic tweaks should be fairly simple unless they have some seriously bad spaghetti code.