I haven't read every post in this thread, but a couple of points:
"Pay to progress" - I know what the OP means by this, but he didn't explain it very well. In FM7, without VIP, and without having a high reward tier, I think it only took me just over 100 hours of gameplay to have every car (apart from those you couldn't buy directly). In FH4, even though I'm now at reward tier 11, and even though I eventually cracked and bought the ultimate add-on, partly to get VIP, it took me over 300 hours of gameplay to have every car that can be directly bought. That is a big difference, and I agree with the OP that progress is painfully slow without VIP, which I believe is what he meant by pay to progress.
Wheel use in FH4 - I know exactly what he means because I felt the same way, I could use a wheel absolutely fine in literally every other driving game on the market, but with FH4 I couldn't keep the car on the road. With FM7 I did find some cars massively faster with a controller, but it seems to be mainly a tuning issue, so it's a problem if you have to drive a car in stock form and it's badly tuned. I don't know what changed, but I suddenly found myself able to use a wheel in FH4. It coincided with getting a better gaming monitor, so maybe it was a latency issue that affects FH4 particularly badly for some reason. All I can say for sure is I now seem to be able to do similar times with a wheel to what I used to do with a controller, faster in some cases, I've gone back and beaten an old rivals time that I set with a controller, using a wheel. I never like having the wheel on the screen, as it never exactly matches the real wheel in any game. E.g. here you can see the on-screen wheel lag in GT Sport:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2oukQAP6vIAt least Forza gives you a view without the wheel, in GT Sport there is no cockpit view that doesn't have the wheel on screen.
I mostly find FH4's physics quite realistic with a wheel. One exception is that braking seems to have too much effect on preventing you from steering in FH4. GT Sport goes too far the other way, you can turn while braking to a crazy extent, I think reality is somewhere in between the two. But in terms of the way cars lose and re-gain grip, I feel FH4 is as "sim" as anything else, and better than most games. I've played FH, FM, GT Sport, Assetto Corsa, Assetto Corsa Competizione, Project Cars 2, F1 2017, F1 2019, Raceroom Racing Experience, rFactor2, and IMO FH and FM actually feel the most realistic in terms of how grip is lost and re-gained, it's a major reason I'm playing FH4 now. You only have to do a handbrake turn in FH4 and GTS, for example, to see a huge difference, with FH4 being markedly the more realistic of the two.
The main annoyance for me with FH4 is the time-locked content combined with the introduction of the playlist that increased the time it takes to unlock the time-gated content. But all the games I've mentioned have their issues. E.g. the attempts to improve the penalty system in GTS over the last few months have been laughably bad. For being "full" games, none of the others come close to FH4 and GTS, they all feel rather skeletal in comparison. And frankly, if you want to seriously compete over an FIA season in GTS it is far more of a timesuck than the FH4 playlist.