That is ultimately the most frustrating part. The AI does seem to be, on the whole, better. Not massively, but a bit.
PD promised us for the first time we could choose difficulty options for the career mode but then they went and nerfed it by still having them scale upwards in the Cafe Book races, meaning the first chunk are easy no matter what. Then they went and added a bunch of events that are fixed difficulty, and generally hard from what I can tell.
That helps nobody. Faster people are frustrated that a huge amount of races are too easy, more casual/slower players are frustrated at hard events that their easy difficulty setting doesn't affect.
Then of course we have the forced starting format, where 90% are fixed as the spaced out rolling starts, the other 10% are fixed as grid starts.
The single player in this game could be improved tenfold with no actual new improvements added. Just the option to change the start format and a difficulty option that affects ALL races. If I want all the Cafe Book races to be standing start, with the hardest AI, that should be an OPTION. For those who want an easy ride through, or for those that do actually enjoy the catch up format, let them have that OPTION as well.
I thought it as finally happening when PD announced difficulty settings in the career mode but then they went and still PD'd it.