You are way way more critic towards the game than it deserves, talking about gameplay.
There are issues in every game, but the most complained things are not so game breaking as you make it sound.
Well, there is one element that is really flawed, fouls, but they are going to fix those.
Free runs on the flanks are there, but that doesn't mean the game is broken because of it, simply because playing at reasonable difficulty levels (Top player,Superstar and Legend) it's very difficult to score with an unrealistic frequency. I would call it gamebreaking when you just had to go to the flanks, cross, header, goal. Thankfully crosses are not so OP anymore.
CPU players doing backheels: i have seen them, but they are nowhere near as frequent as some of you say. I would say the CPU in Pes 2018 is more human even at highest levels.
I also read that stats don't matter. Well, that's just not true. In Pes 2018 you can feel if a player is faster or a slower dribbler, if he has a great header scorer, if he has a good kicking power or not. Especially, the kicking power is the most obvious improvement. In Pes 2017 whenever i made a shot that seemed like a rocket with a player that had like 70 or so rating i felt depressed. In Pes 2018, while shots variety is still not there, power is much better represented, and feels realistic. Besides, not every shot now is a rocket straight to the goal. There are shots with more dipping, shots that are very powerful and some shots that are just not poweful enough. Again, not so much variety as in Fifa, but it's an improvement.
This game is a great evolution to Pes 2017, a big evolution, and with few tweaks coming from fouls being actually called for me it will be the best it has ever been in gameplay department.
Talking about Master League, that's a whole different matter, offline modes are not good, mainly Master League didn't receive the attention it deserves. Adam said that some issues like Liverpool playing in Europa League will be fixed soon, but that doesn't fix the fact that the entire mode feels old, stale, and nothing like a Career mode should be in 2017.
I keep playing Pes because of the gameplay and i really feel they improved a lot this year, so much that i will try to play ML a little more trying to enjoy the matches and not being bothered too much by other unrealistic elements in ML.
Even in its current state ML is the only offline mode than can give me a sense of achievement, can't really feel that with BAL or League or Cup.