Mhm. Turns out that accessibility to and usability of a mode is very important to its popularity.
It's not "devs vs suits". That's lazy woe-is-us mentality.
In addition to being hardcore football heads, Clint, Rex, and John are also video game designers who know full well themselves that they have to balance the hardcore gamer feature set with means by which new players can engage with said features in a way that's easy to understand, learn, and master. Even with the recent investments in usability and accessibility with Play The Moments / Big Decisions / Things To Do / etc., there are still far more people who don't understand how to play franchise in Madden effectively than those that do.
For example, one thing about Madden which came to light to me over this weekend for me is that many people just don't understand how to manage the salary cap in franchise. With the exception of my brother and myself, every user in my online franchise made it a point to re-sign every single pending free agent on his team, regardless of age, position, or OVR. Obviously none of us here on OS would do that and we all understand how to manage the salary cap, the importance of the rookie draft to building teams and managing the cap, and so on. My friends though simply don't know what they are doing and don't know any better.
Left unchecked, my brother and I, who do understand how to manage the salary cap because we follow the NFL incredibly closely, run circles around our friends with respect to team management because we understand what we're doing. Our friends don't, and - this is the important part - the game makes no effort to help those people along in that respect. We have to enforce artificial house rules on each other to give our friends a chance and level the playing field. In this way, Franchise is still very weak. Players shouldn't have to read a giant manual or rely on arcane knowledge passed down from friends to learn how to play; it's 2017 and none of us have that much free time anymore, games need to respect their players' limited time budgets. To that end, there is going to inevitably be more investment in the area of teaching people how to play Franchise
while playing Franchise going forward, despite many advances on the accessibility front over the years which have indeed helped as Clint himself has messaged.
They'll get there but it's not going to be as direct of a path as people here want it to be. And they'll indeed purchase or not purchase the game accordingly.