[Syd Thrift]

The biggest thing I see is that people play the game for hundreds if not thousands of hours a year. You're going to find loopholes and see weirdness. That doesn't mean stuff shouldn't be closed, of course, but you're just plain not going to be able to create an AI that is robust enough to stand up to people cheesing it in various ways, and if you play long enough you will probably have to create a bunch of self-imposed rules to keep you from doing so.

In that respect it is an awful lot like other games that people play for thousands of hours. Not just FM but Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. You play those for an extended length of time, you'll find yourself self imposing rules like "okay, no alliances with France or the Ottomans" or "no playing Germany and no cheesing lend-lease with powers who have no reason to just give me their equipment". That doesn't make those games "bad", it just makes them things that can't stand up to extended scrutiny.

All of which is to say, for sure 23 has some issues. The devs rebuilt the sim engine and that's had some issues (particularly with steals, it appears) and they may have made some tweaks to trading / roster management AI that's getting issues (I'm definitely seeing the "hey, let's sign up a bunch of 35 year olds to play in AAA and block prospects" thing, although I guess TBF I have aging set to like .8 so that's got to be at least partially on me). But 10 year old titles with literally hundreds of dollars of extra DLC available still have major AI issues (in the sense that "major" means "if you've played the game for a couple thousand hours you are terminally aware of major exploits") and I feel like getting on OOTP for somehow not being better, especially when all these listings of issues have no actual proposed remedies, is more than a little silly.