I too have doubts if they will get out of this one. Maybe renaming the series would help. When they started the tuner thing, there was a lot of controversy among the long time players. But because a lots of kiddies did buy the game because they didn't even know what it was about in the first place (What, there were NFS's BEFORE underground??). Now they ran out of tuning ideas, same old cars, same old crap, even the kiddies now know it sucks.
They just... Screwed up. I can't imagine sitting at a big table, brainstorming about the new NFS, and just somebody says: Okay, let's take one of our best selling series, make it worse and sell it again!