I decided to buy the game despite the negative reviews. The critic reviews highly exaggerate the game's flaws. the progression system is not half as bad as they made it sound. I am probably about halfway through the game and I have never had to grind to get anything. I have only redone a race that I already won twice at the beginning. I have been upgrading my cars at the rate that I am supposed to be and I am stockpiling money. I just went out and bought a 100,000 dollar car, and upgraded one of my derelicts to 300 (which is like a supercar level and is way higher than I needed it to be right now) and I still have about 350,000 dollars. the speed card system is not random, it is scaled to your cars level and you can control one aspect of each part roll, also you can just buy speed cards for like $10-20k at the tune-up shops which also scale to your level. the whole system is just designed to slow you down a bit so that you can't just buy a car and instantly upgrade it to max and also to give you even more customization options to fit the way you want to drive (through the parts' additional perks). However, if you wanted to, you could get through like 100 car levels in 15 minutes with about 12 part tokens and $50k.
Here are some other things I think it is important to note: the characters rarely talk to themselves when you are driving, I have barely noticed when they take control of the car for cutscenes because it almost always makes a lot of sense, unlike previous nfs games you have to pay to fast travel unless it is to your garage and you can only do it in certain locations (i.e. found gas stations and tune-up shops), I found the different areas of the map to be very different both in scenery and types of roads, and it is not acurate in my experience to say that there is no sense of speed. The cars you have at the beginning are slow, but once you get your cars up to about lvl 200 (which isn't that hard), they get going pretty fast. Also, the whole process of unlocking customization options is not that bad. You will get almost all of them very quickly and the last ones are not that vital to appearance (i.e. exhaust, spoiler, wheel parts except the rims) but succeed in giving you something to look forward to and give you more encouragement to drive around the open world to complete the challenges that are everywhere. That is not my favorite part, but it does make sense and is mostly tolerable.
All-in-all, I will give it a 7.5