Yup, the current gen games are pretty terrible. Yeah, they're more realistic, but that doesn't make it a better video game than the previous gen games. The gameplay is slow, boring, frustrating, and has a much lower skill ceiling and higher skill floor. I played the games for hundreds of hours every year from NHL 09-14, but I only played 17 for three months (until the end of the season in the 6s league I was in) and I'll be doing the same with this year's game. I'd much rather play a fun, arcade-y hockey game than a boring, realistic game.
The most annoying part of all of this is that the beta was actually pretty fun with the changes they made to the skating engine thanks to the feedback they took from the "game changers". It was by far the best gameplay they had on the current gen consoles. Then for whatever reason they decided to push out a big patch within a few weeks to revert it back to the slow, boring, frustrating gameplay from the last few games.
To give you an idea of how bad this game is, here's the goals per game per team in the most popular 6s league in the series.
*scoring is up to around 2.39 GPG (per team) since this was first made
**the numbers under each game are the seasons