Just unearthing this one, because I was contemplating it in my latest FM24 game and I'm sure it's been discussed before.
I can see the argument as to players maybe being good at penalties and not great at finishing, but I don't see it the other way around. Meaning I expect a strong correlation between the two, particularly if finishing is strong. You can of course have exceptions, but because penalty taking ability is rather opaque for a researcher to establish (you only really see one or two players take penalty in a team), it's hard to evaluate for the whole team.
I would even go so far as to say that the pen attribute is unnecessary when you already have the key attributes that factor into this ( finishing, composure and pressure) and could let the game calculate it implicitly.
But beyond being controversial, all I'm saying is I don't think there should be players with 17 finishing and 9 penalties - or just fringe exceptions. If they are not good at penalties, most likely it's composure/pressure related, not technique related. It just seems like very few players (regens) get decent penalty taking stat and a positive correlation with finishing might alleviate this issue.
Case in point, avg. finishing 14.2, avg. pen 8.3. And none of the decent/good finishers have more pen taking, which is also rather off.
And I've looked at the scouting list which includes 15k regen players, so age 23 and under: just three players with 16 pen taking and another 23 with pen taking over 13. There are way more with finishing 15+ (272).