I see a lot of "muddying the waters" happening in this thread to either hide from or obscure the absolute fact that this game is following a strictly "profit over quality" model which IS the fundamental problem I think OP was trying to get at. The unfortunate thing about this is that this has been the case since HUT was introduced to the series.
It's a simple equation, in my opinion. The game's popularity (i.e., sales) affords the studio more time to innovate. Less popularity means less leeway given for innovation and a more strict focus on MTX and the modes involved with MTX. This is why games like FIFA and Madden, while still incredibly MTX-focused, have a more robust feature set than the NHL games. More popularity/sales/profit means more money to spend on devs/time which in turn means more innovation.
So basically, I'm saying this game will never be more than what it is: an ok hockey game that gets the most minor improvements every year and is sold as a new game. We will continue to NOT see drastic improvements in areas that would improve the feel of the game (like skater AI and goaltending AI) because these things are difficult to do and would require a large chunk of the gameplay programmers' time. The easier thing to do (and what we see happen) is to have your gameplay programmers implement new "features" like the pressure system (I forgot the official name for this feature) and the changes to how you initiate a hit that we got this year.
I mean... think about what we got this year. The pressure system, programming-wise, was essentially a timer that got started once a team established themselves in the offensive zone and that would get bumped up based on certain events happening in-game. Once that timer/bar is full, you manually lower the attributes of the other team's players. This doesn't seem that difficult to implement at all. Compare that to being tasked with creating more efficient and robust AI pathing algorithms and decision-making trees that would improve on what they already have. It's a night and day difference in terms of complexity.
Of course, this is all my opinion and speculation but I don't think it's any mystery as to why we have the product we have. I'm also not trying to be doom and gloom and I certainly don't blame the devs who are in the trenches at ALL, just to be clear.
No doubt HUT is EAs cash cow for the nhl series. With players spending into the thousands after the initial purchase of the game it really isn't surprising the level of development this title receives when the bottom line is looked at. No need to change much if there is a consistent customer base spending more on the game than what you're worried about losing in initial sales figures.
