I agree so much with this that I've reset my login to post (been playing & reading for years but never really posting here).
It's not just one feature or another, but it's been a consistent general trend last few years: more meetings, almost none of them any fun at all. If SI say that X feature is too hard / costly and can't happen for a while, alright, that's one thing - but it's another thing to see resources & strategy actively go into beefing up FM as a soul-crushing work simulator.
Each year I've become more and more used to simply ignoring various features, many of them new, to retain/improve my playing experience. No press conferences ever. No tunnel interviews ever. Skip reading 90% of the emails in the inbox. And make no mistake, this isn't coming from the typically "casual" segment of the player base - people like me are people who've played FM for a long time and often spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the game, people who aren't wanting FM Lite or whatever it's called. It's got nothing to do with 'streamlining' or 'making it easier to understand', it's about the fact that these meetings and emails usually don't add anything useful or fun. I'm fine with playing a difficult and complex RPG, for example, but not if it wants me to file tax forms to sell my loot.