Has anyone besides myself ever thought that each defense should have a different degree of difficulty built in to the rates at which players learn the defense and improve IQ's? For instance, I am always aggravated when very athletic freshman with high defensive ratings can't learn the man to man defense. I think IQ's for man to man should improve faster than zone and much faster than fastbreak. Maybe not improve faster but with a higher mean for the distributions of IQ's coming in as freshman. What do you guys think?

I agree with you, but in the game I think this would deter coaches from running other sets. 

I've always liked the idea of switching the press to just be a modifier of the other defenses that you could use in certain situations. In real life there are very few teams that press on every possession. Its usually just something that is used in late game situations or for a change of pace.

ploww, I understand what you are saying. Yours is a more traditional point of view on the game.

For 20 years at all levels I was successful with the opposite. From 5th grade  to 10 years in JUCO, we competed by controlling tempo. We ran standard FB. We also ran the sideliner FB (UNLV - Tark, Michigan St) to force tempo. We ran multiple presses from the 2-2-1 ( learned from John Wooden) to multiple automatics ( Pitino - Providence.)

But along your line of thinking, we did drop back from the press to some other form of defense. We also went from our FB to different half court sets. However even in the half court sets we pressured on defense and ran uptempo offensively. Out talent was almost always inferior to the opponent, but controlling tempo was the key to our success. It''s always easier to slow down than to go uptempo and play out of your comfort zone. We literally wore teams out or broke their will.

However, because of the way this engine is set up I think they almost have to keep it the way it is.  HD is setup with a traditional, somewhat "Old School" point of view.
Because of the way the learning curve is setup inovation is punished by losses. Because we  used the same techniques on defense or offense no matter what we were running, we were able to install everything in 3 weeks no matter what system our players came from.  On offense our philosophy was,  "Push, push, push," for the first available good shot. On "D" it was "pressure. pressure, pressure."  We were as good as everyone else in our half court stuff and better than the opponents in our Uptempo/Pressure stuff.

Here you are punished because of how the learning curve is setup. You could never do that the way this game is setup. I don't know that they could change that effectively, so better to keep the current options, I think.