Some Easy But Major Upgrades to Franchise Mode

I'm new here, but I've been playing NHL every year since NHL 15, mostly GM/Franchise Mode. I am also a data scientist, so I have at least a reasonable idea of what is possible to implement and what is unrealistic. Over the years, I've compiled a few features/improvements that I think would be relatively easy for devs to implement, but would have a major impact on the experience of the game. Hope this doesn't come off as whiny, they're just suggestions. 

1. The potential system is not accurate. The following potentials never develop into NHL players: LOW/MED fringe starter, starter, bottom 6 f, 7th d, top 9 f, top 6 d. LOW top 6 f or top 4 d also never develop. This needs to be changed. It might even be as simple as re-naming the potentials by shifting them all down somehow (e.g. high top 9 f becomes med bottom 6 f, or med elite d becomes high top 4 d, etc).

2. Speaking of potentials, it's strange that some probability/potential combinations never seem to appear together. You will never find low franchise, or high 7th D, for example. High top 6 F and high top 4 D are also exceedingly rare, but in my opinion there are plenty of "high floor, low ceiling" players in the first round of every draft class who fit this type of category in real life. It would be nice to see these things in the game.

3. Trade value should be allowed to run negative, in which case teams might be willing to pay to get rid of bad contracts. You could determine trade value by a simple formula involving age, potential, overall rating, AAV, and number of years remaining on the contract. Rebuilding teams use this to their advantage all the time in real life, but in the game we can't acquire draft picks for taking on cap dumps.

4. All players not in the NHL today (prospects and draft eligible players) should have a random "perturbation" added or subtracted from their potentials and ratings at the creation of every new franchise mode sim, so that every franchise mode is unique. If you play the game once, you know exactly who develops and how, so it's not as enjoyable when you know exactly who to draft and trade for.  Instead, you could keep the players' current potentials and ratings, and randomly add or subtract from those. For example, you could draw x from a Gaussian with low standard deviation, rounded the nearest integer and use that as the player's overall modifier. You could cap the integer at, say, +/-4 in order to  ensure the modifier isn't too crazy, but gives some slight variation in overalls for prospects and draft picks. You could do something very similar for their potentials as well (just draw two integers randomly like above, and use them to increase/decrease the probability/potential, respectively. For example, if you draw -1 and +2, a med top 9 forward would become low elite. Again, you would just have to play around with the distribution you're drawing from so that it doesn't make the potentials unrealistic, but at least changes them a bit each time).

5. Any prospects outside the first round that actually develop into NHL players all have very poor skating (~80 acceleration and speed) that never develops - even for med elites in the later rounds. This should have more variation.

6. There should be more "late bloomers". Technically, the players in franchise mode don't have "exact" potential until they are 27, but anyone who has played the game knows it is very rare for players to grow much after age 22 or so. It would be cool to have players that might plateau around, for example, 81 until they hit age 25, and then suddenly jump to 87 in a breakout year. This would make trading with young players way more interesting, as right now it is very easy to tell how players will develop (e.g. an 80 overall med elite 23 year old defenceman is very unlikely to develop past 81 or 82, and will certainly not get close to the 90s).

7. More forward/defence draft picks outside the top 5 that develop into 90+ overall players (high elite or even med franchise potential). This is rare but happens in real life at least a couple of times every draft (Pastrnak, Fox, Kaprizov, etc), but almost never happens in the game outside of goalies. Yes there are late round gems, but they rarely develop past the mid-80s, even if they have med elite potential, unlike in real life where these kinds of players can develop well into the 90s.

8. This hasn't been a problem in previous years, but this year there are practically zero high-end defensemen in any of the draft classes just a few years into the sim. This leads to outrageous contract demands for defensemen (I assume because the formula works by comparing the defensemen's value relative to the pool of active defensemen in the league, which are all low overall).