Best thing they ever did. Reward for spamming the R1/RB was the worst thing they ever did. Makes people responsible for their actions. Let's see if they tweak it (slight tweak down in sensitivity should do it) instead of caving to the masses and butcher it.
Balance between players. Unless they've fixed it, especially for online, there were exploits in that some attributes meant nothing, and with no caps, you put people on an unfair playing field if they were either not aware of it or didn't have points to put into it. The FIFA system (points going into your player over time and based on how you play) would be a great model, but I don't see it happening. This gives you the most pick up and play ability. Allowing height/weight changes and having attributes change based on that is a good idea too.
It appears endurance will mean something, as you can recover from fatigue on the ice, and having that bar in the lower left corner of the screen is a very nice add. I like the pro's and con's to the perk system. Makes you think before you build out a player.
Skating is 10000% better and will make the gameplay that much better across the board. Gameplay addresses issues in all game modes, so the skating and actually calling penalties will make the game better overall. They cannot cave into the mob mentality on penalties though. Cannot stress that enough.