While i'm not a fan of rubberbanding AI in the slightest, in past GT games i've managed to have some pretty fun and sometimes challenging races with the AI that EVERYONE says is horrible/the worst/extremely bad etc etc.
My way around the 'horrible/the worst/extremely bad etc etc' AI is to basically learn/take note of how they drive, how they react to things and then race with them/against them with that knowledge in mind. Even GT Sports AI was a lot more intelligent than a lot of other games, especially when it comes to collision avoidance.
Proof being right below (just after the hairpin early in the vid), where the R32 behind me makes an initial move to avoid a spun R34, then tightens the avoidance further to follow my path. In prior GT games, and many others, that R32 would have either braked to a stop or just plowed into the R34.
I know it's still not 'the best' but it's a heck of a lot better in some ways than it's ever been before in GT.
But the rubberbanding is definitely worse in the past few GT games, how they slow too much for you to catch up, or fly off ahead doing unbeatable lap times for a while.
I said "PD thinks" that AI racing is for newcomers/occasional players/kids.
Now y'all enjoy the game how you wanna enjoy it. I'm saying pointless races vs AI, there's a tiny bit more to GT than this. And I understand you're worried about everyone's feelings in here, but among my hundreds of friends in the game who are all pretty much GT hardcore players, I can assure you less than 1% cares about the quality of AI opposition. It's a non issue once you actually start "playing GT", do you have a problem with that fact?
GT has ALWAYS been about racing AI cars, as that was basically all you could do back in the early games (aside from tuning/modifying). For those of us who've been playing GT for over 20 years, AI has and continues to have a large influence in our game time.
There are a lot more things to do these days in GT (online racing, visual modifications, photo taking, livery making etc etc) but an essential, and still desirable, part of the game for many players in the single player offline AI racing.
You simply
cannot attach 'made up' percentages (from your opinion) of how many people prefer anything other than racing AI, because it's impossible to know - even by using trophy lists (because some people may spend almost all their time taking photos or making liveries etc) to try figure out what a percentage of players are doing or not doing. Trophy percentages do give a good impression of what people are doing, but they still don't account for absolutely everyone, and they're more accurate than your imagined 1% stat.
So
i can assure you, your 1% guess is highly
and factually inaccurate. And you've got no easy way (aside from surveying all the hundreds of your friends) of proving you're right.