Just sticking to a couple of points here since I'm meant to be going to bed now!
Except games programming is a collaborative work by several dozens of programmers, designers, artists, animators etc etc. Comparing the input of a few people who worked on an old football game (who weren't necessarily responsible for the aspects of Perfect Striker you think they lifted!) in a game like this is pretty far-fetched. They might chip in with ideas or suggestions but ultimately they don't get a big enough influence to lift a template from their old game and plunk it into a new, far higher budget title.
The movers and shakers for FIFA are people who grew up playing the PES series -I think Gary P said it was ISS PE2 that he first got utterly hooked to - with backgrounds in football management games. I've actually mentioned PS to Gary before and it seemed like he didn't know much about it. You could argue that, therefore, it'd be easy for the ex-PS devs to then sneak aspects of PS into FIFA, but the history of FIFA's improvements and the difference between FIFA and PS below the surface strongly suggests otherwise.
This bit is something that I saw first on WENB, and it confuses me still. Who says Eurogamer is a pro-FIFA site? That tag implies that it is more inclined to praise FIFA over PES than your average site, and yet the general review scores are much a long the same lines:
PES 2010 (PS3): 78/100
FIFA 10 (PS3): 91/100
WC 2010 (PS3): 83/100
In which case surely all but a handful of sites could be deemed pro-FIFA?
Eurogamer scored 7, 9 and 8 respectively. It'd be a stretch to say that the 7 compared to '7.8' is indicative of an anti-PES stance, since Eurogamer make far fuller use of their scoring system than most review sites. A 7 is a decent game, as most people would say is true of a 78% given by most other sites. It's one of the weirder examples of Adamism in recent times, when he took Eurogamer being invited to a
press event (so, one of many sites) to play PES 2011 as a sign that PES 2011 was going to be great. It's like when someone says 'revamped animations' and a handful of people instantly read this as PES implementing the Euphoria engine.
I think I've said this before but I don't mind the concept of assisted controls in PES themselves, but there needs to be room to play around and manipulate that assistance to give the game being played out more detail. I don't see assisted controls as
that bad if the rest of the game is designed to be more sophisticated to suit. I fully agree that PES 2010 went about balancing the game in completely the wrong way and that the future of football games is inevitably going to involve far more freedom.
However I don't think that completely cutting us loose is the answer - not yet. As I said a page or two back I don't think humans can, en masse, handle analogue sticks precisely enough without some sort of visual aid. Also I don't think the AI is sophisticated enough to deal with it yet. Just typing my train of thought, and it may be bollocks, but part of me expects the AI to take a bit of a hit in a PES with significantly more freedom, especially in the unlikely event it does go full manual. It depends on how much Konami have used the assisted passing alleyways as a shortcut to boost defensive AI awareness.