As a regular 2k player they pretty much force you to pony up for VC. My friends and I love to play in the Rec against other teams and most players are 90+. Cant expect to compete with 60 overalls. And the progression system is so slow it would take literally weeks of playing time to get that rating. I play for a few hours a night a few days week. If I didnt buy VC I probably wouldnt hit 90 ovr by the time the next game comes out.
I quit playing MUT because it's so driven on buying packs. Even the players you can earn by grinding are not as good as the ones you can win in packs, and most of them you cant even auction or trade.
MUT is still better that FIFA's ultimate team. Even if you got all of the best players ( and they do not give you anywhere close to the handouts like MUT seems to), you still have to get contract and fitness cards to be able to continue to use them.
I tried out FUT, and I I have 2 "loan" players I can use for 6 games and then I lose. The rest of my squad is a mix of bronze and silver level players who j have to try to put together such that I get a good "chemistry". Even doing challenges to try to meet objectives in order to get better players, you lose fitness and contracts on everyone who played and you are usually doing a full game for each challenge with the reward still not being much. Plus most of the challenges require either playing online opponents or already owning certain cards.
With MUT, I have put together a team with all of my starts being 76+. The NFL 100 gives you guaranteed 84 "rank" players that I can use for as long as I want after each 4 or 5 challenges, as well as the 1 rank 74-78 you get per challenge. Some of the challenges are literally one play for me. I am sure that I may not be able to hang against online opponents who have everyone leveled up (FIFA also doesn't have the "upgrade" component like Madden) or purchased through packs, but I have put together a pretty fun team, including a bunch of UT guys as filler (plus Kamara as my HB). I have yet to run out of "single player challenges", and I am working at getting better at playing to let me beat higher tier levels of the challenges (which can often result in you getting rank 86 versions of the player).
I still prefer career mode for both games, but I am actually playing quite a bit of MUT, where I quit FUT after I lost my 2 free loan players and had the majority of my team on their last contracts, and only a few "cards" to use to get them back to usable, not to mention out of fitness cards so that they weren't too "tired" to play worth a crap.