Licences are licences. You can't just say "ah, we had it before recently so it should be okay". I work in a massive company and licences are still a pain in the backside for us so Liberty coming along doesn't immediately mean licensing is incredibly simple now. It might not even have changed anything at all. When they expire, that's it and it's hard and fast with no grey areas. I completely agree that it'd be better to have more circuits in the game, but it depends what it comes as a compromise for, because something will always be compromised in order to achieve the inclusion. Is it quality inclusion elsewhere in the game? Could we afford to lose F1 World or Braking Point? Or, more seriously, if you need to pay for licences then is that money-saving achieved by making redundancies?
In terms of circuits; I don't miss Portimao. Paul Ricard is marginally better but not a deal-breaker for me. The tracks i'd want are over a decade old and they'd have to redo the track designs to relate to the current cars. I do wonder what tracks people would want though. Africa to complete the realistic continents (and it feels like F1 may have some appetite to do such a thing in real-life so they could look at getting that track in F1 games for future) and maybe another in South America? Buenos Aires seems the best option but I don't see F1 going back to Argentina until a competent driver comes from there and the best since Reutemann in the 80s is Mazzacane... so that's not happening anytime soon in real-life, so why would you bother to spend all that time integrating a circuit in the game that will never be used in a real season? I'd like Germany but there's probably enough European circuits, so similar with Turkey. Same with USA and the Middle East having a fair representation already. So it's Kyalami from Africa. Malaysia/India to get one more Asian?
I suppose you could circumvent the over-saturation of certain locale by saying they're only interchangeable with same locale? For example, by saying you have to replace a European race with another European race and an Asian race with another Asian race. That way it can take its exact place in the calendar too. For example, if you replace Zandvoort with Hockenheim then Hockenheim is exactly where Zandvoort was.
In terms of changing season lengths, i'd assume permutations of faults/bugs/errors would be a contributing cause. The fewer variables you have, the easier it is to track and squash bugs. However, if your playerbase has drastically different game setups then it's a logistical nightmare unless you have a large team. Instead of 3 career lengths, you'd suddenly have alot more. If you have a 19-race season and a bug occurs then do problems only occur when a season length of 19 races? Or will it happen with other lengths? The investigation period would suddenly take longer and then the fanbase will just moan that things take too long. It's lose-lose.
Even performance growth would need to change relative to it. For example; Currently if there's 24 races then you have a general reference for car development to each other. If you have 16 races then it's just 2/3 of that and 8 races is 1/3 so the growth is all relative to each other. But say you want 17 races in your season, suddenly the growth is 17/24 and the development of each team is erratic as it would flow over into each season that may have regulation changes that conflict. There'd also be giant gaps in the calendar that need filling with the social events.
It's just the inclusion of the sheer amount of additional variables that I think is the issue. It'd be nice to move circuit calendar orders though and I'm not a masssive subscriber to the fact "oh the weather wouldn't work to have a race at Silverstone in November as the temperature and weather is wrong". It's a game. It's not supposed to be real.
