I have to say I agree with alot of this and have felt similar over the past few years.
The greatest part of FM is the community. It's the fact it was this niche game that spawned so many wonderkids over the years. It's the fact we all have romantic stories of weird and wonderful clubs we fell in love with because of FM.
But we didn't fall in love with them all because FM was great, it was because of our imagination. FM was simply the tool that enabled us to do so, and that tool has become poorer and poorer over the years. I genuinely believe, that even with a lack of competition, the FM series would have massively died out years ago had it not been for the community.
When you take the community and uniqueness of that out of it and judge it purely as a game, and not some romantic notion, it really is quite poor compared to other modern games on the market.