There are a few wrong assumptions you are making...
1. You are assuming you can pick up a sports based video game and be expert in it just because you know the sport. It's not true at all. If Neymar or Messi play FIFA for the first time, I can assure you they will get their @$$es handed to them by a kid online who probably never played a game of footie in his life. Same will be true for Madden, MLB The Show etc.
2. You are assuming DBC 14 wouldn't have a steep learning curve. I have played nearly all prior cricket video games released on consoles, and have been a cricket fan all my life and yet it took me quite a while to get used to the game and it's controls. Yet I'm sure I will be well beaten if and when I venture online for my first few games. It will take you plenty of hours to get used to the game and generally online is for hardcore gamers where you are bound to come across against better players.
3. Another incorrect assumption on your part is that sports based video game is very similar to the actual game, which is never true for any sport. In FIFA folks sprint all over throughout and press all the time which would get the team to burn out by half time in real life but it pays off in the video game. In Madden people pass 90% of the time and barely run the ball. Similar strategy would result in the team throwing bunch of picks and be taken apart but it doesn't work that way in the video game. Similar concept works in cricket. In real life McGrathesque line & length would be unhittable but in a video game there's nothing worse than being predictable. You have to mix line, length, pace and throw bunch of slower balls else you will get killed. Unfortunately that's how online works and you can't expect a video game to be a life-like simulation of the real sport.
1 - In a fast paced, action packed game such as FIFA I'd agree with you... Being adept at the controls is far more important than being a tactician and thinking like a footballer, FIFA goes too far though for me and is nothing like football which is why I've played Pro Evo more over the years.
Also with cricket being a slower game with more breaks in play, the mental/tactical side of the game is much more prominent - I hoped that bowling wouldn't favour erratic changes of pace/direction for six balls an over, but a more lifelike set of deliveries.
If I were playing an NBA Jam-esque exaggerated cricket game where it's obviously going to be a slogfest I wouldn't have any complaints, but I had thought DBC was going for a more realistic feel.
2 - Yes, I won't be at the peak of my abilities after a few hour's play, but I have read the manual and played enough of the practice and career modes to be comfortable with aiming and selecting my deliveries. These deliveries that are getting slogged all the time are not weak deliveries, whether I'm new at the game or not, the game's interface tells you that these deliveries are "85mph" or so and you can clearly see the line and length is decent. I find it odd that such deliveries can be dispatched with such ease so consistently.
3 - FIFA and Madden are probably the two worst sports games to choose from a realism perspective... Also I don't think that would translate to cricket anyway. In football and american football, you have to condense 90 minutes and 60 minutes of play into a more reasonable timeframe, usually 10-15 minutes. This means that many aspects of gameplay are compromised to ensure there's enough action in the shortened period.
This doesn't really matter with cricket - you can just naturally play less overs with lower scorelines, as well as the breaks in play being quicker/skippable speeding things up so less compromises have to be made.
I play a lot of Tennis Elbow 2013 where the strategy of IRL tennis is very well replicated in the game, and Virtual Pool 4 which actually improves your real life pool play as it's so realistic, and there's hardcore driving sims like GTR Evo/rFactor where I like being able to test accurate representations of F1 cars or whatever (even if I'm hopeless at it!).
I'm probably unusual in that I like such a high level of realism in sports games.
When I've batted offline in Veteran mode, it's been really tough though so DBC basically already has what I'm looking for so I'd like it if I could just create a match room in this difficulty rather than the online default, which seems to be Pro.
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