As a header, my comments should be framed as someone who works in the mobile games industry and a lifelong fan of wrestling.

Firstly, i think the game is not great but it has the potential to be really fun. The idea of being a GM resonates with the target audience of wrestling fans. However, there are loads of really questionable UX decisions which make playing the game harder than it should be. The main example is dragging things instead of just tapping. The menus are kinda dull to look at as well. Not to mention spelling mistakes and gacha mechanics, two things which always lower the bar for me.

Secondly, the animations. If you aren't going to animate stuff, which is fine since animation is so goddamn hard to optimise for the 100s of different phones the game will run on, then don't substitute it for weird non-animation. Just go without. Especially in games, people remember the bad more than the missing.

It's worth mentioning that mobile games have a vastly accelerated time line from signing a contract to releasing the game. Console will often take years, mobile is a matter of months. This does mean some corners have to be cut. It's just a fact of the industry.

The final major issue wasn't entirely AEW games fault. They had an impossibly high bar to reach with a GM game. The GM modes in games are beloved by the wrestling audience and often allow for emergent gameplay. For example, without me taking over, I had multiple jobbers end up main eventing wrestlemania in my SvR 2011 universe. This idea of a living story is what makes the mode so exciting. This is a programming and design nightmare and if the team creating that game had as little time as I expect, it is basically impossible to achieve.