Regarding the ML, I'm beginning to believe that Konami made a mistake of adapting the mode to the other game's Career Mode. The Master League itself in the early days was its own brand, a game mode no other football or even sports game had. It had a powerful narrative: transforming a team of made-up underachievers into a club capable of winning made-up silverware in made-up leagues and european competitions, while buying and selling real-life players and made-up players too, using made-up money (PES points). No one else was doing this, not ****, not FM/CM, not Madden, not NBA Live, no one. There was the world of real-life football, and then there was PES', and football fans were happily living in both.
Instead of building upon that brand over the years, creating and maintaining a unique fantasy world that stood out from the more realistic approach of ****'s Career Mode, Konami folded and bit by bit introduced real competitions, real money, the ability of being able to change clubs, which ultimately corrupted the purpose of the Master League. Now naturally the fans are confused because the mode nowadays has the name of the Master League, but the mode itself is an underdeveloped attempt at a Career Mode with less players, leagues and features.
If it had been my decision, I'd have built a separate career mode whilst keeping the Master League in the game too. Now it's impossible to do so because the series has spent a decade educating its crowd (particularly the younger part of it) that the ML is supposed to be a career mode, when in reality it was not meant to be it. Who knows what the ML could have turned out to be if only they had believed in its unique brand and worked within that framework of glorifying their own fantasy world, instead of trying to copy everyone else. And the problem of spending your time copying other people is that you'll forever stay one step behind them, never catching up.