I doubt they'd ever just give people gold CAFs to start with as nice as that would be, they should at the very least be alot easier to obtain.
I essentially feel the same way, Ultimate Team was my Go-To mode in UFC 2 and I already lack the motivation to play it in UFC 3 for not only how unbalanced, but how repetitive it is.
The move slot options is among the most terrible aspects of this mode, in UFC 2 we could apply around 50 5* moves in any area we wanted. I completely agree with the rest of what you said aswell.