I'm playing mostly the FOMO event roster with the odd rivals and test drive thrown in, that experience has led me to a lot of GT racing, a lot of WTC, some excellent historic/Group C etc gameplay and so on. I certainly don't feel like I'm not getting my money's worth and in fact my biggest gripe is with the relative dearth of modern GT/Prototype racers.
Okay, I see the difference between us. You're seeing the races as varied due to the types of car being different, which is fine and valid, if that makes them varied for you, no problem. I don't find the different cars to drive particularly differently once built/tuned, so that doesn't give me much feeling of the races being varied. Yes, some cars are more planted than others, but what makes it all so repetitive and identical to me is the races themselves are all just laps of a track for similar duration.
I'll explain how the Tokyo race in GT7, even though it's just one race, is so much more interesting to me than any career race in FM. For starters, it's always there to go back to, it's a fixed reference benchmark, accessible as a single race rather than one race in a series. Where FM has had longer races, there hasn't been any point investing time into them as they were only temporary. It's a fixed weather progression, with the track starting quite wet, and gradually drying out as the race goes on. This makes it a finely balanced choice between tyre compounds, as some types of tyre will perform much better on lap 1, but may wear out faster or give worse grip on later laps. This also impacts whether you pit or not, as it's definitely an option to use wet tyres early on and pit quite early for slicks. Then you have the fuel consumption side of things and how this interacts with the build. I've sometimes added weight reduction one step at a time with a car, seeing how the improved fuel economy impacts total race time. If I take some weight off, and have less power as a result, am I now lapping faster or slower for the same amount of fuel used each lap. Most of the time I tried to make the race a no-stop, but there are virtually no cars where you can do that without any concerns for tyre wear or making the fuel last. Also, obviously there's personal taste involved, but I think the track is amazing and so much better than any fictitious track in FM. This is one of my faster total race times for it, with the fuel just lasting the race, and very worn tyres at the end:
Then you have a completely different race in the Maggiore Human Comedy race, for example, which is a one hour Gr.3 BOP race with no building and tuning. That race is all about trying out the different car options, working out how to optimally drive each one for fuel consumption vs pace and trying to develop consistent pace over the one hour duration. Again, it's a permanent individual race so you can keep going back to it, and there's a leaderboard for laps completed.
Or there's the 30 minute Le Mans and 60 minute Spa races with random weather, or other 60 minute Human Comedy races with different sources of interest in each one, e.g. some limit you to one car, some you have a PP limit etc.
So that's what I'm comparing FM to - the different types of car in FM's races don't make them feel varied to me, I want the events themselves to be varied with lots of different sources of interest in each one.
