Who cares about licenses. Waste of money... The PC modding community makes that a non-issue. I'd rather they spend their money/time on gameplay and graphics improvement.
Not more licences, but more content. Any way Konami can find to expand the game off the pitch will help them enormously; be that empty league slots, or DLC microtransactions to help them secure some real extra leagues. Seriously, if Konami can find a way to make their 'Career Mode' as deep as EA's then there's just no competition. As you said, licences are not important: the modders will take care of that in a jiffy, but modders can't add extra leagues as far as I know - I'd love to be wrong about that.
For me, PES' six league limit is by far the weakest thing in the series.
On the pitch, PES 14 is impressing me a lot. Compared to Fifa 14, the pace is spot on. The daytime lighting is fantastic (and I'm sensing proper dynamic lighting - look at those floodlights on during the day with the shadow indicating early evening). The night time lighting is just as good. The stadiums look fantastic, the crowd looks fantastic, the AI appears excellent, the animation is improved beyond sight and I love the sound of how the crowd will be properly dialled into the flow of the game now.
I can't wait to get my hands on the demo; when does that usually show up these days?
Fifa? From what I've seen so far, the defending is just as bad, the speed is still too fast, the celebrations are the same stupid crap. I haven't seen much of 'NG' just yet, but the impressions at EA Forums are that this is PES' year regardless of which version of Fifa it's being put up against.
Incidentally, have any changes been made to PES version of 'Gameface'? The way I remember it, all you had to do was stick your face in the template, and that was it! No fiddling about with dots, no hopping from game to website and out there on the pitch it looked exactly like my head had been stuck on top of a footballer's body. Amazing. Hopefully it still works the same way now, because it didn't need any changes at all!