yeah that's my biggest gripe after Forza 3.
Career is shown to have a CarPG style progression. Upgrades are "earned" and aren't just outright bought. System seems good to rein in ruthless spending and encourage car progression, but I think it will depends on how you start plus how fleshed the racing is at said start.
Like FM6, you can start basically wherever and whenever and the open wallet+market makes it easy to hop in to something like a hypercar series at the start if you so please. In something like GT4, you can't do that for some time until you open up the cheese strat races. Even then, you need the licenses and the cost of entry for capable cars discourages mindless spending. There is nothing I couldn't just buy my way out of in Forza 6, but I've had to do more to earn that cash in GT4 - even playing it again not too long ago.
IMO, even with a CarPG setup, as long as they don't make the various series numbingly repetitive (FM6), they got a good shot. I think they've focused on better diversity in adopting bits from Showcase-style events more in what I've seen which only helps. FM6 was a chore in that the racing series were just track collections in a certain order, just differing car tiers. I'd have spent more time in Showcases, but they softballed those and were a smaller fraction of the fun.
Reference for the info:
. 6 looked so much better. Although they did try to hide the baked in shadowing with time of day and weather shenanigans. Can't expect vivid shadows if its cloudy all the time. 
