TFF -im think of starting a new save in league 2 in England. What number attribute would you call good at that level 11 or 12 maybe ?
Mate, for example, some players in English Premier League have “18” Strength attribute and it’s possible to find in lower leagues players that also have “18” Strength attribute but the difference in quality between those players is huge so as you can see looking at a single attribute or few attributes is a bad way to judge/find players.
The right way to judge players’ quality is at first find out their approximate total amount of points (CA) that they have to spend on their attributes and then look how these attributes are spent (on what attributes).
I'd say when you got enough experience it isn’t hard to determine approximate CA of players without using any 3rd party programs such as FMRTE or FM Scout but if you have enough stress in real life and you don’t to strain your brain in a PC game then I suggest using those 3rd party programs because they do boring calculation for you.
So let’s say you manage a club in League 2 and you need to find out what players would be good for this league and what players would be bad for this league, in order to do that you need to go to the team that is predicted to finish the 1st place in the league and check the CA of its players, let’s say the average CA of its players is 125CA, now you know that players with 125CA are very good players for this league and if your team consist of 125CA players then you win this league without any problems, the same way you find out what players are bad for this league, you go to the team that is predicted to finish the last place in the league and inspect its players to find out their average CA, for example, it’s 100CA so now you know that 100CA players are bad players for this league.
Of course, CA isn’t the only thing that should be looked at, it’s just the total amount of points that a player has to spend on his attributes but it isn’t less important how this CA is spent on what attributes, for example, some of your central midfielders greatly contributes to the attack in your tactic so you what to be sure that the decent amount of their CA was spent on the attacking attributes.