If FM was in the hands of EA, FM10 would require 200 GB hard disk, 12 GB RAM, quad core of 12GHz each. I have other motives of grip against EA, but they're too long, including demos with heavily reduced requirements from full game.
FM09 and FM10 have a performance much better than that of FM05, for one.
And yes, bells and whistles, that's what happens for asking 3d graphics for a game of managerial type that is suppossed to be about tactic and theoretical football knowledge, rather than seeing Gerrard's balls shifting under his shorts.
And now asking 3d stadiums that one can design. Blerg.
I do agree with the request that the new versions should focus heavily on solving the match engine flaws than anything else (the corners, my centrebacks running to mark on the half of the rival's half of pitch even when set to minimal close down...) and that maybe too much focus is given to the casual gamers that just want pretty colors (get rich fast scheme: make a keleidoscope game); and I also expressed somewhere else that I would like more if each year SI would sell at the right price a bug fix patch bigger than that of mid season along with a database update, to keep new full games with full price for the years where they have enough new features to add as to make it be enough improvement as to be really a step forward.
And yes, it can go a slope down in the future and, as everything, sooner or later FM will decay, but I wouldn't think the fall is now. Maybe it's began? Can be, in the moment the updates are yearly, I'd say it's a sign.
I will buy it, because as I said more than once, the FM programmers are the only I know that seem to improve performance and seem to care for clean and elegant code, while most of the rest seem to consider increased computer power as increased room to absorb bad code and less need to care to make it efficient and working in the least amount of lines, judging by some cases of what was done with much weaker computers and is done later needind way stronger ones. And that virtue of the SI programmers make me hold hopes that the fall is not yet to come.
As for the download of tactics I can understand them when done in two ways: for those who haven't yet got a hold of the game and uses them as a means to see how something that works works, and see the effects of changes to that (I thought at my start with the game to do that, though I never did take that path), or for those is that they want to play the technical director, and since you can't hire a coach to do the coaching (taking vacations don't just get the team in your assistant's hands) they go to hire tactics they download. The later in turn makes me understand the player section and who's best as the other way for those who would want to have the staff handle the signings but instead would choose to use forums. The flaw of both is that it's not as much as getting the opinion that could be wrong for something that has been tested to be superior, which takes off from it. I've not used either, because to me the tactic creation is the core of what a managerial game is, so taking a team to success with my tactics is what I seek. On the section, I will say I was disppointed the first time I visited it, since I expected it to be akin to one subforun in another site, a place to discuss and analyse tactics in FM and real football.
But what I really really hate, is the every year November-January flooding of "this game sucks, it cheats, short it out because I lost, thousand shots no goals and lost, guuuh graaaaaa huuuuu". It reminds me of a Quino's comic strip of his Mafalda series, when a small kid watches his sister's friends playing chess, he asks about the game and is told the player that does checkmate wins, one will win, so the kid goes to ask "So for what does the other play?". So I would apply it here: if you don't want to admit defeat, then don't play.