First, let me say that I like the screen shots provided in the Critical News forum. They have done some nice work on the practice plan page and the depth chart interface.
I am sure the folks at WIS are basing their drastic re-design on feedback they received from folks who didn't come back after the free season they received last year. It's easy to understand that many of those folks, who had little to no previous experience to GD, found the new advanced features overwhelming. Heck, many experienced GD players found them overwhelming. Combine that with the lack of any kind of user guide, it's no wonder almost all of them dropped after the one free season. (Historically, of course, that's the same trend seen every time a mass offering of a free season was offered - mass influx, mass exodus afterwards.) I applaud their efforts at making the game more accessible to new players. I just think they've missed the boat on the best way to do so, while maintaining their current user base.
When they announced the planned modifications in the coach's council forum some months back, nearly all of us made the same point many of you are now - while complexity can be off-putting to new users, forcing an entire level of the game to use a beginner interface was not the way to accomplish the goal. My suggestion at the time was to develop a single-player tutorial mode, that walked a player through the entire game, from recruiting to setting depth charts to creating formations and playbooks and gameplans. No one at WIS even responded to the idea.
Those of us who have been around for a long time have asked for ONE thing above all else - consistent results that can be reliably predicted based on a known set of attributes (or, more accurately, the difference in attributes between one team and another.) Things like fatigue and injuries and yes, a VERY SMALL bit of luck would factor in, but we want to know that our RB should do well on outside runs based on his speed, or that a QB might throw more interceptions due to his poor game instinct, or that a DB might successfully defend more passes because of his technique. I guess we're still going to be waiting.