[Young player reputations still increasing too slowly (still leading to older squads)]

Just throwing my voice behind this to say that this is a huge deal for me. 

[Dynamic Youth Rating - A bug, a mess or a completely unexplained feature/cash grab?]

I think it's important here to define the expected user experience on this feature. I think in general that what users are hoping for is some combination of the following:

1. user actions can have an effect on the future quality of the national team in a country. This is already somewhat true, right? A user can develop players of a specific nationality and do so better than the AI, generally speaking. But I think players were hoping that simply by their performance, the AI would get better players to work with.
2. user actions can have an effect on the performance of other teams in the region in continental club-level competitions. This is really the one that I was hoping to be able to influence as long-term well-played saves in nations past the best 2 or 3 get pretty boring as the other teams don't really improve the way the user's team does. Essentially the goal would be to drag along the other teams in your league to match your success.

As for realism, I am sympathetic to the fact that for "realism", we may not want a system where if you sim 200 years, the entire world football structure is completely random. That said, maybe some people do want that; personally I think it would be fun. But I rarely get past 10-15 years in any given save before the next version comes out. There's just not enough time for any "realistic" settings to make much of an impact in the type of saves I play.

 

From a user experience perspective, I think an ideal situation would be that when you're setting up a save in the UI, there are a couple of well-explained sliders that impact how much the quality of a given nation or league can be impacted by performance; users who want to forego "realism" for a visible impact in their 20 year save can slam those sliders to an extreme value. Users who want realism for a 200 year sim can leave it on default or make it less impactful. etc.

 

I agree with those who are balking at the fact that this was billed as a "HUGE" deal, when it's really almost nothing at all. You've whetted our appetite for ways that we can drag an entire nation into the elite of world football just by managing our club/nation, and it's clear that people want to be able to do that.