But, do you agree with me that a large amount of people want the game released on December 6 with patches to follow? I want it to release because getting GT on a 2-3 year dev cycle with 1 year of updates would be a great change of pace from the "wait 2.5(?) years for GT4, then 6 years for GT5" cycle.
Everyone wants it to come out on Dec 6.
Everyone also has different opinions on how many features they will sacrifice at release to potentially come later as patches. Some people don't think advertised features should come with the proviso of "may be included at a later date".
Personally, I think the game should have enough features at release to be worth buying regardless of whether patches come to it or not.
If the game isn't worth buying as is, and they're relying on features that will be patched in later to sell it, then yes it needs to be delayed. And I say this as someone who thought that the GT5 "delays" were mismanagement of information and resources of the highest order, and should not be repeated without serious cause.
GT6, on the information that is available now, is looking annoyingly like GT5 with improved physics and a few (not a lot) more tracks and cars. The one major feature we've seen, the course creator, may or may not come at release. Some people are completely happy with that, but compared to the jumps between GT1/2 and GT3/4 I can see why others are disappointed.
Where did I say I was trying to pass off my wager as fact?
You didn't. But you can't wager on something if you can't determine a result. You might as well have said "I'll wager that there are 14 invisible, intangible teapots orbiting Venus on December 6th". Pointless.
Anyway, back to standard cars: they do not all drive the same as premium cars. There are several examples of the same car in both premium and standard. Some of them drive in a similar manner, some are obviously different. It's been a long time since I played, but I seem to remember the GT40 being one of these.
Given that they didn't touch the standard cars graphically (as of GT5 1.01, some were fiddled with later on), I'd be surprised if they went through and updated all 800 sets of physics for GT5. I imagine there was a semi-automated porting process, and the numbers from GT4 were more or less dropped straight into GT5's engine with fudging for whatever parameters didn't exist in GT4. Presumably the premium cars were reworked from scratch, even if a standard model already existed.
And so you end up with some cars where the GT4 version ended up similar to the GT5 version, and some that didn't.