Badger, around PES3/PES4 time I was saying to myself (and to Konami via letters, which were ignored as part of Konami company policy) that the game was the same each year and I was getting fed up of it. I know there were little tweaks, and the little tweaks made all the difference, but it was the same teams (no lower league teams so I can take someone from the bottom to the top), the same competitions (starting off in the PL and ... staying in the PL), the same game modes (the same ML not being a very realistic reflection of reality and no "online leagues" which I wanted for years), the same flaws from the PSone days being kept in because removing them would mean rewriting the entire engine. As far as I'm concerned the game could have been rewritten to use PS2 technology, but wasn't, and even now on the PS3 it's still not been rewritten, so it's still using the same old PSone building blocks. Like building a game out of Lego.
I think that's what the negative people are getting at, I haven't been excited by PES in a long time (but in fairness I don't feel the need to bang on about "God PES2009 looks poor" because I knew I wouldn't be interested as soon as I knew it was using the same engine, other people will look forward to it and they're entitled to). PES5 was PES at it's peak (according to the majority of people I know who still play PES), so to my mind, for PES6 or PES2008, it should have been the time to rewrite, especially considering PES6 was the first on the 360. Now PES2009 isn't a rewrite either and the word is PES2010 will be the rewrite - I really hope so because that is the one thing that will get me excited about PES again.
I know they love football and they're good at what they do but until they make full use of the CPU power they have now, every PES is the same to me.