"slogging through player after player, considering whether to scout to additional levels and then move on to next player is just drudgery"
I felt this same way. It is tedious to go through recruits with level 2 info and decide who I want to scout. Maybe filters will help a little more there. But it is a pain. I took the lazy way last time and just did some FSS states, did my own camp and then just ast coach scouting trips on already discovered players. This saved some time but if I'm building the best possible team I can, it's probably not the BEST way to do it.
Here are some my thoughts about this and what WIS is trying to do.
They're trying to make this game more involved. This is a game you pay for and the consumer wants to feel like they're getting their money's worth. So if recruiting took 15-20 minutes and even if you really enjoyed it, do you really want to spend money for that much enjoyment? A lot of us would say yes, but maybe a lot of people who have left would say no. So, you take a really fun aspect of the game and make it bigger. You make it longer. You make it ingrained in the entirety of the game by having it last all season (basically). Now, you need to also make this FUN or else smart folks won't fall for it. It's like in gaming in the old days of NES where you made games unreasonably difficult in order to artificially lengthen the game. Same type of idea here, I think. As long as it's fun, and not tedious, boring and annoying, the idea to me makes sense to making it more time consuming.
Here's another reason why I think this way. A lot of coaches are dropping teams already for various reasons but in the new HD, it's probably not going to be possible to have 10+ teams because of the time commitment. It's just too much. You'd probably think this is a huge issue to WIS and they're losing customers, right? Well I'm not sure. Who are they losing? They're losing teams from coaches are probably considered in the top 5-10% of best coaches. This means they're making deep tourney runs and racking up a lot of credits. They're extra teams are basically paying for themselves, no? So from a business standpoint, why do they want to scramble to keep having these coaches with so many teams? They're not making money from it. Or at least not very much. So, if they're able to actually attract new players to this game, I think you'd want to have folks that are average coaches who have just a couple teams.
My 2 cents on what I THINK they're trying to accomplish here.