I agree completely.
It's not about the fact that we get shoved with yearly release with full price tag point. It's about the competence of the developer team. I think they have the heart and passion but unfortunately not the developer skills to get it done in a year. This however doesn't matter since NHL series sales have been stagnant for years no matter the end product.
What screams the good old f-you, at least for me as a consumer, is the fact that they re-did the whole 'World of CHEL' mode from ground up, including netcode for the game, released a beta, received the complaints about the Dressing Room Errors and matchmaking issues from players and still the didn't make a public note about the issue even being acknowledged. Now here we sit a month later and all I've read on the official forums is "We have identified the issue and are working on it". After that it's been tumbleweed and silence with vague promises of maybe deploying a patch in the coming weeks. We are living the prime time of annual EASHL games (ECL included) up until new years and it's been a month of uphill climb for the player base. It's just disgusting how we are being treated. Dear god, some of us even paid extra money to get to try play this game three days early.