Are you sure that you arent exaggerating for effect now?
Its so common I cant believe you havent seen it.
Not only do they run at unrealistic speed, often they simply teleport where they need to be to take the unlikely catch.
I've been playing 15 hours a day for 3 days now on the PS3 (I'm between jobs). I haven't seen any of the things you describe.
I've had my share of frustrations (guys getting run out after being sent back because they decided sliding the bat was for other people in particular, and my batsman bowling his _extremely_ part-time leg spin at the death in a 50 over match) but I'm not unhappy with the quality of the fielding.
I've _just_ seen a catch dropped in the gully (I was at the non-strikers end). I've had 3 or 4 caught and bowled opportunities that I've offered up dropped.
I've never seen a pace bowler field anything off his own bowling that struck me as super human.
I had one particularly memorable match against a team where the two guys who regularly were at silly mid-off and silly mid-on apparently hated each other, because they seemed to take turns throwing the ball directly at each other when doing the "try to run-out the non-striker after a defensive shot" silliness.
But that was just funny, not annoying.
One of the things to bear in mind when playing a game like this (and I speak as a many year veteran of MLB: The Show, which is a very similar kind of game) is that the animations are usually a reflection of random numbers being generated underneath.
So sometimes you'll see silliness (like catchers digging the ball out of the ground) - but it's not necessarily a bug, other than a graphical glitch.
That is, usually a game like this will go "yeah, it's near enough to that guy that he might catch it. Calculate a chance he'll catch it. get rand(). If rand() is less than the chance calculated, it's a catch. Now generate graphics to match the result (catch or drop)"
It can be jarring to see, and there might be issues with how the "chance to catch" is calculated, but it's not the game cheating.