Permanent Online MMO microtransaction basis will be the death of this game

You should have made it a normal game, with a fixed price, and optional online.

It baffles me that the big brains at EA thought a stronger profit stream would be through making it free to play and offering microtransactions for non-functional cosmetic items.

Micro-transactions are only useful in pay-to-win games, or "pay to have a competitive advantage" games, or "pay for this fun item that actually does something" games, and for games that are not intrinsically a niche topic like skateboarding.

You don't have enough people with a genuine interest in skateboarding to warrant the gamble on making money through cosmetic microtransactions that offer zero gameplay utility.

Furthermore, forcing it to be permanently online means you have ongoing server costs and need to recuperate those costs via microtransactions, not to mention the need to constantly keep a team on to update and create new items to sell in the store. It's clearly going to produce a much lower revenue stream than just releasing the game at a fixed price and forgetting about it.

I highly suspect the replay editor is so glitchy because it has to track and process online player movements too.

It just baffles me that EA have gone this way.