rewind feature being completely optional shouldn't, in theory, bother anyone (your lap times are not 'certified' if you use rewind for example, and i suppose there's achievments for not using it, not sure though) but i feel it takes away from the excitement somehow. In f2 i was struggling trying to avoid collisions with other cars; knowing every mistake can be corrected will make races less intense.
On the other hand,..i could never complete fm2 and i gave up playing regularly when races started getting too long; with Fm2 AI becoming very challenging and aggressive towards the final laps, one second was all it took to completely and hopelessly ruin a perfect 20 mins long race. which is realistic and cool and all, but makes you go fuck that and turn the console off, and makes you a lot less thrilled at the thought of going at it again.
Ultimately, when all is said and done i believe rewind will help me appreciate the game more, I don't have a lot of time for videogames lately and besides, correcting your mistakes won't make winning races automatically easy.
As for Dan's claims; yeah, i don't care for "definitive". My idea of definitive right now would be forza + gt *replays* graphics; which makes forza a lot closer to my ideal racer than gt.
There's still a lot that can be done and simulated, but i don't think that's for this gen.
What i find harder to accept is the 10x the polygons and 4x the texture resolution claims; which is technically true...in menus and makes me hate the whole marketing strategy behind the game, which was entirely played on half truths and rather misleading pics.
Funny part is, when the game was unveiled, we were shown a trailer which was 100% representative of ingame graphics and it looked good enough for people not to care about numbers, or have reasons to doubt them. The game didn't need that kind of publicity in first place, and yet it backfired.