Why is this game so hard to play

I share your frustration. My perspective might help.

Firstly - not to offend - you're not a victim, because the game is the same for everybody; the good players face the same difficulty as you do. Ultimately, you just gotta adapt and get better through practice.

I understand your complaint that Madden changed how to be good, and it's a sidestep to what you were good at before.

I have 3 examples. My dad is about your age (grew up on all the old school Maddens - I remember watching him play Madden in the early 2000s as a kid with no clue what was going on), and he complains about the newer Maddens just like you. And, he was good - always knew football. Then I started playing Madden since the '09 installment, right about when I fell in love with football as a young teen. I attest that the newer ones are hard - annoyingly hard. You used to be able to hop on and beat people with the same handful of plays if they were amateurs that didn't know the proper play call to stop you. For example, if your opponent was in cover 2 - where the safety sits down in the flat - you could drop it between the corner and the safety with a streak route, and it would work every time, because that's the right play for that defense in basic football theory. But now, the A.I. is more elastic, and the corner will lurk with the receiver unless you force him to sit down via another receiver, making it seem almost impossible to rely on that read by itself. So, what used to be a perfect read against a less specific A.I. is now twice as complicated, as not only do you have to read cover 2; you have to read cover 2 and force the defender to obey his true zone. You'll also notice that linebackers trail receivers deep, almost to the deep secondary, even though their assignment is a shallow zone - again, they assist deep unless you make them sit down on a shallow pattern. This is a QB read nightmare, as you now can't tell who's man, who's zone, who's shallow or deep zone, etc.

Field goals used to be a boring chore in previous Maddens. Now, they're annoyingly serious and hard (who cares about the chip shot extra point??). The last 2 or 3 installments, I actually had to pause and contemplate the risk of trying the extra point to tie a game after a touchdown to go to overtime. It's like that old arcade game where you have to stop the spinning light on the dot. Why did they dig this up as a new challenge?

Defense is also harder. You used to be able to call a heavy blitz and stop a run play, as the resolution of strategy was "run or pass guess." Now, it depends. It depends on the gap & the blocking scheme your opponent wants to run. You might send an Engage 8, but if there's a blocking mismatch in a particular gap, your opponent will run through you like a hot knife through butter. It's really frustrating, as you think, "I sent the kitchen sink; can I stop anything at this point?"

My point is that EA tries to make the game more strategically challenging by complicating it. There's more CPU power, and therefore, there's more specificity afforded for the A.I. You might be used to the old Maddens where if your opponent called a certain defense, a particular route would be an easy read. But now, the A.I. is less robotic, and the amount of knowledge about offense and defense needed to not throw 7 picks a game is quite high. It's not necessarily that the game is petty or poor in gameplay; it might just be harder.