@WhoAteMeDinner:

At least my beloved Porto won their Champions League match, not all is lost! Also Nuno Espírito Santo is doing great on the Premier League, it's good to see him and his glorious beard shining for Wolverhampton.
United knows where to find me. First thing I'd do when I got to the training ground would be to pack Smalling, Bailly and Lindelof's bags and tell them to follow Zamenhof to a retreat in Tibet, and come back only when they've mastered the dark arts of defending with the help of Ra's Al Ghul. That defense is so bad right now, it'll surely not even come close to save Gotham.
@slamsoze: That reminds me of the Team Spirit thingy in modern PES. In retro-PES, a team with high levels of cohesion and mental stability - a great real-life example would be Simeone's Atletico at its peak - would be measured by the players that were part of it, even if of course the tactics and strategy made an impact, as it does in reality. Besides having players with good overall statsheets, they'd have guys like Godín, Juanfran, Tiago, Gabi, Koke and Diego Costa who should have very high Teamwork and/or Mentality stats. Same with Guardiola's Barça, having a midfield with three of the players with higher Teamwork stats + passing/technique in the world helps to create superb team chemistry.
Nowadays, instead of having Mentality or Teamwork stats for each player, you get a "Team Spirit" overall rating and that's it. Current-day FC Porto would be an example of a team with high Team Spirit, but in reality they pull that off because of high Teamwork and/or Mentality players like Casillas, Maxi Pereira, Herrera, Marega...however, they fit Brahimi there, who has horrible Mentality-Teamwork combination. On retro-PES you can capture these kinds of nuances because there are mental stats for each player. On modern-PES, borrowing the word you used, player individuality is sacrificed for "context". So you can better reproduce Brahimi's tendency to often play "hero-ball" - one man vs. an entire defense as he often does in real-life - on retro-PES. And your team will have lots of chemistry depending on the players you pick, not because you summoned a deity or something and he upgraded your Team Spirit rating...
@fmicablues7: Sometimes they do "drop the hammer" and Sergio Ramos is a great example of it - though they've abandonded the idea of giving him 70-something defense, upgrading it +80 -, but more often than not they're not as cynical as I am when evaluating a player.
It's fine, like I said it's more a matter of each person's particular vision. I've yet to understand how my vision works on PES3, will have to test it furtherly. What I do know is that the game seems to be a great "playground" to test stats, as it's so obvious that it has a visible impact on the gameplay.