i think people are confused. cubes v. 1 really did suck. our HB was basically eddie-2-yards-and-a-pile-of-dust-george, we had agents building possession receivers before they were actually usable, and we had CBs who thought smooth operator worked.
and those were the good dots. the majority of our dots werent even properly slow built for ALGs. fucks sake, we had a tackle who bought into the "tackle helps blocking" charade that went down in the early seasons
http://goallineblitz.com/game/player.pl?player_id=340731 (lol sry iced)
the upper echelon of EE teams would beat us pretty easily, especially our first few seasons, although a lot of those games were pre-WL. but the fact that we still beat a bunch of teams with that retarded group, with no network for outside support, no farm team, etc, means... they sucked so much more.
now as for version 2... i guess we'll find out. but peaking early? yes we heard that s17... and s18... and s20... and now s21 (for some reason, we didnt hear it s19, when we were playing with day 240 dots in an uncapped league). but tbh, we're 360 days in now and running out of seasons to still be considered early.