I've really cooled on the latest versions, tbh. '05, '06 and '07 were the best ones in terms of the time I spent on them (as much as humanly possible, given that I was a feckless student ), and I found the ones from '08 to '12 really enjoyable - my greatest success came in the last one, when I made Rochdale unbeaten Prem champions and was a whisker away from winning the CL three times on the spin, thanks almost entirely to a GHod-like regen named Pauletto from Brazil who scored 55, 59 and 63 goals respectively.
Then something changed in '13, and the ones afterward - you couldn't just find a successful tactic or two and transplant them across teams anymore, and a lot more work was needed to tailor your tactics to individual games and leagues. As someone who viewed games in the match engine in 'Extended' highlights mode up until that point, it was a struggle to watch the whole thing and actually pinpoint what was going right and wrong. I missed '15 because of straightened financial circumstances

, then '16 came out and just broke me entirely - it took way too much time to figure out what was going wrong as I kept getting sacked, and '16 in particular was horrible because the match engine excessively rewarded tactics that used traditional wingers getting down the line and getting balls into the box - I have a pathological fudgeing aversion to playing that way, since I nearly always go for some variation of narrow teams with wing-backs and one-two passes in the final third.
I don't know if I'll pick up '17, in all honesty. If you guys like it, do let me know - also, I'd love to hear if they fixed that whole 'wingers are gods' thing from the '16 ME.