I think the reason why I and so many people bring up the Forza Horizon series is because in my opinion they have done it the best while other games like you mentioned The Crew and DriveClub it's still extremely difficult to actually control your drift,what you end up with is just a power slide instead of a actual drift that you can control and actually link into another drift. Ofcourse the Horizon game gives you the ability to use more or less grip tires and I'm assuming that's the biggest problem with most games,they only give you a specific tire for that car and with most games you can't change it. The NFS devs really needs to engage more with their fans to better dial in their physics instead of giving us this embarrassment they call improved physics.
It's really sad to see this because they clearly have the ability to do better looking back at the Pro Street and Shift days, I completely forgot that they took a year off for this game and this is the result,this makes me even more upset.