As we all. However, as someone who is related to a person who works in the video game industry, I can assure you that focusing on franchise pulls exactly ZERO resources away from focusing on game play. Why? Because, as surely has been explained a bazillion times here, development teams are divided into specialists who work only on one part of the game. This is simply a necessity due to the complexity of modern games.
Gone are the days when Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario, would design sprites, levels, code AI logic and so on. Now, you have designers, people who work on graphics, lighting, people who work only on animations, people who design models, and as for coders, even they are split into specific areas; my guess is in Madden you have teams designated for coding the logic of franchise and teams designated for coding gameplay. And it would not surprise me in the least if even gameplay is further subdivided.
Long story short: neither improvements to franchise, nor improvements to graphics/aesthetics/uniform/etc, has even the SLIGHTEST effect on improvements to gameplay. This MYTH is borne out of ignorance about how modern game design works. Games are simply too complicated for that sort of thing to occur, except in very small indie studios and lone programmers of crappy smartphone games.