Early code or not, knowing what has happened in recent years, it's not necessarily over-analysing when someone is not really that impressed by various things we've seen.
People can, of course, endlessly find comfort from factors rather irrelevant, like these players "not playing the game as it should be played". However, PES's biggest issue is just that it actually allows you to play like that. Is it now all that questionable when one or two previewers have dreaded to use phrases like "still too arcade", angering some parts of the community who then hysterically begin defining the words "simulation" and "arcade" more to their liking?
So passing seems bloody awful without a shadow of doubt, and I do wonder how they're going to fix that ping-ponging now which undoubtedly is in the game (quick turn passes as I call them in my bad English). I'm not a developer, maybe there is an easy switch or something, but how likely is it that it doesn't come without a cost? So maybe the clichés "don't play this way" and "don't exploit that" will come handy once again.
Every year they say the same things about goalkeepers, they "will be fixed" at later stages and so on. Then at some point there will be the perfectly put announcement that "omg!!! keepers are fixed!!!". But let's face it, fixing goalkeepers in PES has usually meant that some unbelievable bugs in top player level have been eradicated (ones that are not even seen in miscellaneous gameplay videos, were they official or unofficial). That's what "fixing" actually means, doesn't it? I think - having seen most of the videos - it's fair to assume that the goalkeepers will not really change for the better from PES2011. They'll remain just as they have been.
And I wouldn't have any problem with that if only PES included an option to force top player goalkeeping at all times. In fact, it could save PES at least in terms of BAL or whatever it's going to be called. With hindsight, such a little thing would have made such a huge difference to PES2011. It'd have been possible to make BAL at least sort of enjoyable with some careful stats tweaking.
Actually, if I was the producer of PES, I would with no hesitation whatsoever scrap all the other goalkeeper levels than top player. If Seabass is so happy with "realistic" top player goalkeepers in PES, why do they insist on keeping the weakened ones in the game? Quite frankly, I don't get that. What's the use for the keepers we've seen over the years in Konami's OFFICIAL videos, for example?