Bad Jim Ryan, causing massive inflation and slow down of development during a worldwide pandemic.
But that GAAS nonsense is indeed his doing, and no they won't be ready soon either.
The MTX in GT7 is indeed crap and GT7 got royally panned for it at release. It wasn't so much the MTX that caused most of the outrage, it was nerfing the few races with decent payouts right after release. GT games have always been grindy, yet GT7 made it a pita to collect the legendary cars. It's not its worst offense though, the lack of a proper penalty system online killed the game for me.
The ranking system and penalties worked better in GT Sport and they still can't even get the track boundaries right: