While well written, I think the review is somewhat apologetic on behalf of PD. Please bear in mind the context for this game. You have the most experienced racing sim developer out there, operating with a higher budget than most, if not all other racing sim devs, and with a longer dev time than anyone else. Despite all that, they've managed to produce far less content than anyone else manages in sometimes half the development time. Their cars and tracks aren't any better modelled than their competitors, and outside of the Scapes thing, the graphics of the game aren't very impressive. I certainly wouldn't expect it to look as good as Driveclub, given that the GT Sport is 60FPS and has much more going on under the hood, and thus it can't dedicate as many ressources to making the world pretty, but the graphical difference between the two is pretty jarring.
But let's focus on the important things, starting with the online requirement. You mention that most of the features in the game simply aren't available without an internet connection. In other words, when the servers are inevitable shut down in the future, you are, for no good reason, left with essentially nothing. It just baffles me that you do bring up most of the problems with this system in detail, yet it doesn't appear to have a very large affect on the verdict of the game as a whole, despite it pretty much literally making GT Sport a game with an expiration date. The online requirement alone is enough reason to not go anywhere near this game.
And let's look at that content. You say that the game has been divisive because of the new focus. I disagree. It's not the new focus that has divided the fanbase. It's the near 100% failure to follow through on the new focus. There were two obvious routes to take with their new focus on motorsport. A, they could focus on making fictional racing series featuring race modified cars, or B, they could focus on brining real world racing series into the game. They then settled on trying to do both, and mostly botched it. When going through the car list, the game features approximately 80 unique cars, with the rest being alterations, both slight and significant, of existing models. So in four plus year, they, in terms of unique cars, managed to model what other devs manage in just a single year, plys maybe a few months. It's especially weird when you look at stuff like the Corvette C7 Stingray. It has the normal road model, then it has a Group 3 car, which I assume is PD's attempt at a GT3 version of the car, and then they have a road car version of the Group 3 race car, which in itself was a race car version of a road car. Wait, what? How does that even make any sense? What is this madness?
But did they at least focus on specific racing franchises, so that they could actually represent motorsport? Not even close. Their best attempt was GT3, but even that is a mess, featuring cars from 2011 to 2017, instead of just picking one year, like any sensible person would've done. I'll concede that the Group 3 line-up alleviates this problem, assuming that they are indeed meant to be PD's attempt at making GT3 cars out of models that don't have a real world GT3 counterpart, which then means you have a pretty good line-up of cars to choose from, but you'll still have to deal with the different model years, making for a rather awkward line-up. No other racing franchise has an even remotely acceptable line-up in the game. Given the FIA license, the WEC would've been an obvious choice, but you won't have any LMP2's or GTE cars racing with you. In other words, some 80% of constitutes a WEC car field is missing.
Somehow, the game fares even worse in the track department, featuring the worst track selection seen in recent times. Once again, one has to look at it within the context of a motorsport focus, and once again, one can hardly contain ones bewilderment at the choices made. Want to take advantage of that FIA license? Well, you have all of one (two?) track that they race on. How a dry and boring as hell track like Willow Springs, a track that has little or no actual place within motorsport, has somehow gotten priority over the likes of Spa or Le Sarthe, is beyond even my wildest imagination.
This isn't even mentioning the disappearance of the hundreds of "future proof" Premium cars in GT5 and 6. We have here, a developer that was perfectly fine with featuring hundreds of low quality PS2 cars in their PS3 games, but when they actually have good quality models that wouldn't have looked entirely out of place, if at all, on the PS4, they decided to toss them out the window.
This product might've been acceptable from a start-up company who had 2/2,5 years to work on it, but from a triple A studio, who had at least four years to work on (more likely 5-6 years, as they would've been among the first to get their hands on PS4 dev kits) and plenty of experience within the genre, this is nothing short of embarrassing. When taking into account the time, money and experience PD has, I cannot comprehend how you, or anyone else, can justify giving this game what amounts to 7.5 out of 10. You mention most of the complains I talk about here, and in much better writing than I can ever hope to achieve, but I don't see those complaints properly reflected in the overall verdict of the game.
, how incredible is it to get a fair and honest review of a GT game on the world's biggest GT fansite? In this day an age when it seems like everyone has a hidden agenda and so many "opinions" seem to be based on a political, monetary or other hidden motive, it is incredibly refreshing to come here, read a review and never once think to yourself, "does he really mean that or is there a hidden agenda?" 
👍👍.
