[Syd Thrift]

I'm 100% biased by watching a good deal of Lollujo, although he's not really the best streamer in terms of talent at FM (he's the best in humor per minute!) and certainly is not the most analytical or forward-thinking (like, half of his decisions are "ooh, this guy is 3.5 stars and this guy is only 3"). It's not that it's hard - it should be hard - it's that it's possible. You just flat out can't take Hashtag United and bring them into the Premiership. Sorry. It's not doable IRL. That's not a great example because Hashtag United is only available via mods but I wanted to bring that up because it bears no resemblance to real football at that point (which, again, that can still be fun to play; my experience with the mod and with watching Lollujo play were that it was kind of boring but YMMV).

To the extent that it may be harder to "game" FM, I really think that that's in the context of the relatively limited ways that teams trade players in football. Baseball has "challenge" trades and "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" deals. "Trades" in FM, as is the case in real-life football, are nearly always about buying or selling a player. Sometimes there's someone added as a throw-in but it's nearly always players for cash. And yes, when only one side has to worry about player talent, those kinds of transactions are easier to figure out. I think it's much easier to say "we will not be involved in selling, period" or "we will be cash neutral this offseason" than that baseball way which... kind of has to look at payroll but also kind of has to look at current and future talent levels when determining what is a "buy" and what is a "sell". Not saying OOTP does this right; I'm saying it's hard.

FM also has to do a ton more work on the strategy side than OOTP, of course, and it doesn't appear to have the easy-to-cheese exploits within the game itself that OOTP does. FM is also a much, much larger game who employs a lot more developers and I would expect it to be more solid overall. I am not saying at all that OOTP is "better" in AI, just that baseball requires different ways of looking at the game.