What I think a sim is, what nerf thinks a sim is, what Rom thinks a sim is, what Tik thinks a sim is... we'd all have somewhat varying opinions, which is why this "sim" debate is stupid and a black-hole.
Some fans out there believe the better sim would involve accurate hair cuts and boot designs, while another demands accurate team strategies and tactics, while another wishes for perfect physics or realistic ball-control; many consider "sim" to refer how accurate gameplay is to the real thing while others consider aspects beyond core gameplay mechanics, like league structures, stadium representations, licenses, etc. Each game chooses which areas to focus on but neither will ever be the total package, and if you expect them to be the total package then you're setting them up to fail from the get go.
Arguing which game is a better sim gets us nowhere. All that matters are our personal preferences, but saying we prefer a sim is essentially meaningless. I for one prefer an emphasis on realistic gameplay mechanics, like passing, first touch, and deep AI and tactics. But I also have this weird issue with hating the generic boots in FIFA, to the extent that sometimes I'll not play a guy in my CM if he's got generic black boots, while I also cringe at some of Konami's stylistic choices, those elements that can't make you forget that you're playing a Japanese video game.
On some level I agree with your sentiment, but on others I'm not sure I do. I don't being a sim think it is as subjective as you imply. It's fairly easy to look at something and say that it is, or isn't realistic, whether we're talking about passing mechanics or boot authenticity, or even graphical simulation. So, when the word 'sim' is paraded around, it is saying that the game is attempting to recreate football. That's a claim which can be validated or invalidated. Every single thing which I bolded from your post is undeniably a feature of a 'sim'. A good sim should simulate every one of them, though obviously there are limits to how well this can be done, and preferences about which bits you should attempt to implement with highest priority.
Obviously it's not a sim to the point where everything is bang on, and they never will be or can be, but, I'm not so sure that the concepts of what a sim is are so divergent. We may have different concepts of what should be a priority - you've just admitted a minor boot fetish, and that is something I barely notice at all. But I'm not sure it's that difficult to state what is, and what isn't a 'sim'.
When it comes to gameplay, which is probably the biggest issue for most people on Evo Web, I think it's pretty easy to objectively analyse whether the game is realistic or not. There isn't much subjectivity as to what kind of gameplay a 'sim' would be... but there are probably two particular ones which will differentiate between one person's view of a sim or another.
Those two things are, first, how do you condense a 90 minute match into 10 or 15 minutes: this is quite a difficult hurdle. Second, what level of interactivity do we grant to the user? At some level, however much control you take (and you have to take some control for it to be a game), you are already breaking the bounds of a simulation. While making a racing sim is possible to do to an extremely high level, when talking about PES/FIFA we're talking about a concept which is inherently unrealistic - controlling 11 people like some kind of puppeteer is inherently not realistic.
Those two questions are ones which I think there can be some divergence on, but in most other senses gameplay wise a sim is a sim is a sim.
At the end of the day, semantics aside, I think that FIFA would improve from almost any perspective if it took into account quite a large range of improvements to make the game more realistic, and that if EA are going to claim FIFA is a definitive football sim, then they should take those steps. If EA were looking to improve precisely the things which are bolded and weren't being overly timid, they'd produce a better game. This I am sure of.