Basically with barely more than 2 weeks of having played this game I already found out how bad it is.
Ok, two weeks is better than 2 days, but hopefully you can be convinced that with a bit more time spent in the game, many of your issues will become clearer, and show you how excellent the game can be.
1) On my match which is happening right now I'm playing, apparently my opponent fielded a team full of " " footballers. Yes, their name is invisible.
This is because your opponent didn't field a lineup, and as such he will forfeit the game. Now the game still gets simulated, and there is something to watch in the viewer, but at the end, all of the stats from what you saw will be set to zero, and you'll be awarded a 25-0 win. This team has forfeited nearly all other games this season.
So what, may you ask? Well, it so happens that for whatever reason now my players literally foul in every single posession and by the end of the 2nd quarter I have 5 guys fouled out, and the rest is about to do the same.
The "players" in this particular sim are similar to "lucky fans" who at times will enter the game. They tend to be very aggressive, and will both commit fouls, but also draw fouls from your players.
Since I didn't expect the Match Engine to be so much garbage....
Again, this is only the result of the lack of a lineup from your opponent. This sort of behavior won't occur in normal league games. And just to check, this sort of thing hasn't happened in your other games, correct?
2) The game is so bad that literally my best shooter is one with the lowest FG %, whereas the Weakbobs of Fail that came with my initial squad (that I already fired) still hold the best FG %.
There are many skills that go into determining a player's FG percentage, and those skills interact with both the tactics you chose and the other players on the court. Also, looking at your players, they all have pretty similar salaries, so it's hard to imagine that any one is going to be such a better shooter than the others.
3) The ammount of randomness distribution, related to scoring streaks, losing possession streaks, FG %, etc, makes this game one of the worse in terms of randomness out there. The only reason why it isn't worse it's because luckily rules of basketball makes you play 4 quarters so it kinda evens it out.
I haven't experienced too much randomness in this game really. I find it to be pretty good overall. Teams that are clearly better than others will usually win, but not always.
4) Apparently player rating/team rating and points scored per 100 shots are so random and badly programmed, that is impossible to take conclusions in regards to what happened on the pitch, and how to improve your tactics based on it. Too inconsistent and not explained properly on the Game Manual.
Could you be more specific in what you'd want to know about these? Also, if you are interested in how team ratings are calculated, I'd point you toward the Coach Parrot spreadsheet, made by Josef Ka (in the helpful programs stickied post in Help I think). He did a great job to show what skills in what positions are used to generate team ratings.
Both team ratings and PP100 are useful, and in my opinion do a decent job in signalling to a manager how their team is performing on the court. They're not perfect, but there are reasons and ways that they don't take everything into account.
5) The metagame seems really unbalanced as some skills are clearly better even in terms of salary (I've been reading some discussion).
I think all skills can be useful within different player builds and for different team tactics. And they don't all cost the same salary. Skills that are very important tend to get quite expensive, both in salary terms and in how they affect a player's maximum skills