@NFLdropMadden thank you for your nice words! unfortunately I'm not even close to be able to give an answer to your question 'how we can escalate our concerns that aren't being sufficiently addressed?'
frankly, I think the dev team is dealing with so many issues, bugs etc etc that they just can't keep up. for instance, temporally parallel to this thread there is also one about the Cloud Franchise Leagues (on PC), which have not worked for over a week since the last Title Update. there the assumption is expressed that the Franchise Leagues enjoy much less priority than MUT...
I do not want to believe that anyone of the dev team or other EA employees responsible for internal and/or external communication, or quality assessment and bug solving, is sabotaging the processes simply out of laziness or on purpose.
Madden (and maybe MUT with all its sub-modes, packs, rewarding systems, etc. in particular) is a very complex game (most likely also much more complex than e.g. FIFA due to more complex strategic dimensions). if something went wrong at the beginning (i.e. before the game was released) or if there wasn't enough time to test and fine-tune it, further improvements and extensions are even more difficult to implement without additional bugs and issues. if a team of programmers has to release the novelties too early due to time contraints, solving these issues becomes even impossible. the code most likely has not been carefully developed before and every 'solution' will take the form of a stopgap rather than a well thought out and planned structure. and this patterns make it even more difficult for solving the next upcoming bug....
in writing that, I do not want to defend EA or the team responsible for Madden primarily. it is rather an attempt to explain how I imagine it could have come to this. for myself, I find it easier to deal with an annoying situation if I can halfway imagine how it came about.
I do some programming at work too (mainly scientific data analyses) and developed some quite complex codes already. If I did it in a very short timeframe and had to modify it afterwards in order to apply to a different usecase, I sometimes started from scratch (if deadlines allowed to do so) since it was easier to newly design the code for the new usecase than to adapt the existing one (which was not well planned before). for a complex game like Madden, this is not possible at all since there are so many intermediate steps (graphics, gameplays, menus, settings, etc.) necessary to come up with the output, i.e. a complex game.
long rambling, short sense: I have resigned myself to the fact that this year the game is very unlikely to reach a satisfactory state for the players. probably this will also affect next year, if the EA internal organization does not improve significantly. for me, the question also arises whether the expectations (both by the players, as well as on the part of management and shareholders) are not much too high? every year to bring a new version on the market, which contains so much new, that players really have a motivation to actually buy the new version also... I strongly doubt that this is even possible. from my perspective, attempts like the 'Superstar KO mode' and 'the Yard' are reasoned just by this motive: providing something new allowing to sell the same game again and again. it is very disappointing that shareholder interests are more important than improving the game itself. but how could we blame EA for this alone? it is simply a central issue / mechanic of the free market economy....
anyways, I love playing a football game like Madden. and I also love the pattern of collecting items and improve my lineup (as it is in MUT). I therefore decided to try to help improving the game (and swallow all the game-related frustration. well, that sometimes does not work at all...). if my contribution of either bug reporting or sharing the information I got with other players helps the community managers to focus on the most severe issues and bugs, it is maybe a small contribution for improving the game in the medium run...
summarising: I have no answers to share. I only have an approach that hopefully helps dealing with frustration and anger....
Community Manager
