Amen.
I'm going to tell a long (possibly boring) story now, that relates to this - and to
@gabe.paul.logan's question, "will PES ever be good again".
I've told this story before, but ten years ago I was lucky enough to be invited out to Vancouver to meet the FIFA team. We'd just arrived at their complex and were being given a tour of the place, when the producer of their Euro and World Cup games, Simon Humber, emerged from nowhere looking for "the guy from Evo-Web". (David Rutter was the main FIFA producer at the time, another good guy. Seabass was still working on PES.)
(Important note - a year or two before this point, Simon joined Evo-Web to do a bit of undercover research. He wanted to gather feedback, but specifically feedback from PES players, because he was trying to build a game that was more realistic and that gave PES fans a reason to try FIFA. Can you imagine a gameplay producer of a PES or a FIFA ever doing that again, given what we experience trying to get "sim" feedback through to the devs nowadays? His username was
lemondoctor, check it out for a blast from the past.)
He came over to me, shook my hand and we got chatting. But he asked me, "if I walk away now and I was to start making your perfect football game, what would it be like" - and I said "a game where the guy who wins the match is the guy with the better knowledge of football and the players on the pitch,
not the guy who knows the game's exploits, or even has the better reflexes - because sometimes you should need to play a long-ball game to win, and sometimes you should need to play a possession game to win".
Honestly, his face lit up, and he said "that's exactly what I'm trying to do" - and I was really excited. I still think the 2010 World Cup game he produced is one of the best EA football games ever made, and it's a pretty deep game in terms of its gameplay for the time.
David Rutter was integral in getting EA to invest money into the gameplay and (as far as the board was concerned)
take a huge risk by developing the "Ignite" engine and freeing the ball from the players for the first time ("but what if the long-term fans hate it")... and they made the best FIFAs ever as a result. Simon sadly passed away in 2015 - and David was given a higher-level job around the same time. Since then (and the move to Frostbite)... Well. Sales are great. Critical reception, not so much.
If anything, I'd say PES and FIFA are now more "play one way to win, play any other way and you'll lose" than ever - and I don't feel like guys like Seabass, Simon and David are ever going to have the freedom to tear things up again and make a game that football lovers want.
BUT.
Konami have decided they need to take a year off from "full" PES development, to make something that they hope will be mindblowing.
This is an absolute first. The producer (who
according to the PES 2020 credits is Manorito Hosada - who was the Marketing Manager for PES 2014 incidentally, what a strange career progression!) has managed to convince the company to
take a huge risk, not unlike Rutter did (even though Konami don't depend on PES for cash like EA depends on FIFA - which, incidentally, may never really change as a result).
If there's a chance of football games getting good again, PES 2022 will be the moment, I think.
If it isn't - then I don't think it'll ever happen.