I can only speak for myself and GT7.
I think GT7 as a base is just fundamentally broken. On the single–player side, almost all races are structured with the awful "chase the rabbit" style, meaning that the AI cars on tracks are not opponents, but obstacles who sometimes go so unexpectedly slowly that they become outright hazards to share a track with. It also does not help when the AI cars' performance were set many, many updates ago, so with a slow "PP inflation" over the updates, 600PP has gotten slower and slower for the players (in general), yet the opponents in 600PP races stay at the same pace since they were introduced. It also doesn't help matters that an infamous few rabbits clearly go over the PP limit of the events in which they serve as opponents (Giulia at the Nürburgring, C8 at Bathurst), further solidifying the view that everyone else in the field is just an obstacle to get past as quickly as possible before the rabbit gains too much of a gap. In a real race, some of the top content creators speak about "race IQ" and "waiting for the right opportunity to pass", but here in GT7, you're basically forced to make moves as an when you can, even on corners that one wouldn't normally think to pass others at, such as Eau Rouge of Spa or the mountain section of Bathurst for example. With how often physics and PP calculations change, there is no incentive to tune a car either, because it could be rendered undrivable in the next update for all we know.
In short, the entire single–player campaign feels like a chore at best and a total farce at worst. None of the events added in updates interest me because of this. The only races I find myself returning to are the chili pepper races occasionally. With Sophy being forced into this chase the rabbit style race, I don't think it will ever revitalise the single–player experience for me, no matter how sophisticated it becomes.
And all this is even before we touch upon the lopsided economy of GT7, wherein it can take more than 13 hours of active grinding on the game's most efficient and repeatable methods to just buy ONE car. With no other races even holding a candle to "the big 4" in terms of Credit to time ratio, everything else simply feels like a waste of time if you're trying to earn and save up for a really expensive car. Even if you already have all the cars in the game, no one knows what the next update will bring, so you always,
always need to have extra credits to spare.
I honestly don't even want to touch Sport Mode races. I think PD has silently given up on implementing a serviceable penalty system ever since GT Sport, and I keep coming across nonsensical and unjust penalties dished out to innocent parties. Driving standards, especially below DR A, have been genuinely painful to even watch, let alone be a part of. You don't even have to go that far to find recurring evidence of this: GTPlanet's Chaz often does Weekly Race videos, and sometimes all the honking and crashing genuinely upsets me.
Why would I willingly subject myself to this? If PD/Sony don't give us a way to report blatant rammers and ban them, then that by extension is their conscious decision of, "We will allow this behaviour on Sport Mode", which will then drive away the more considerate and mature people. If even someone as professional, presentable, and ostensibly a fan of the series as a GTP staff gets the urge to rage–quit, why would someone looking to have fun ever approach it?
Lobbies with friends are generally where I have most of my fun in GT7, but even then, the peer–to–peer lobby netcode, especially between PS4 and PS5 users, is appalling, oftentimes to the point where I don't dare to go for moves, and instead just sit behind and wait for a mistake.
"Sports can be repeated over and over." But none of the "racing" in GT7 even remotely resembles the real sport or a sport at all.
Honestly, some of the most engrossing time with the game I've had are with the sandbox elements of the game, such as spending days, weeks, months on a livery, making the decals, agonising over the design, just... looking at it, and then shooting the finished product. In other words, I find that I have to make my own fun in GT7, instead of the game itself being fun.
GT7 will be my last GT game because so much of what I've written above feels so deliberate and by design, and as a few others before me have pointed out, I too don't forsee the next GT title changing up the status quo that much.
