..there is no Deutschmark for more than a decade...

No disrespect to Grid-Iron when I say this:

But lets look at EverQuest (EQ) and World of Warcraft (WoW) as an example.

The initial Blizzard team played EverQuest and got frustrated with certain aspects of the game, kill-stealing, boss respawn times, etc... (if you've played EQ and WoW then I'm speaking to the choir)

I like Grid-Iron. It has fixable flaws. There are other Football Sims on the net. (They also have flaws which are different than GI).

If you were to pick apart the flaws in GI, weight them and slap them into a spreadsheet and then add "coding time and effort to fix", then you might start to see why, maybe, GI hasnt fixed them. You also need to add in that each coach on here would weight that "flaws" list differently.

This game is not a monetary power house like World of Warcraft is. I'm sure if you had 11 million + subscribers you could make a pretty awesome Football sim. But its a niche market. So 1. we should be happy that we can play this game for free or for a minimal cost. And 2. GI should be happy that people still play this game, flaws and all.

It's not easy to take an idea from conception to a full working model on the web and have it be successful. On the same token, its not easy to keep your team on a winning streak with certain in-game flaws.