I agree with almost anything you say!
But I highly doubt that a gameplay mod for PES 21 "unlocks" or "adds" animations. Holland etc, can not motion capture new animations, or create new. It's just a gimmick the say to promote their gameplay. All gp mods are just tweaks to certain parameters and nothing more. The core of the game stays the same. So claims like "new animations" or "new ball physics" etc etc are just tweaks to the existing. I don't doubt that tweaks give an fresh feeling but it's limited. The best tweak in PES 2021 in net physics. Also most of the tweaks have side effects. Finally no modder can write new code for the AI to attack differently. So PES 2021 modded, yes it's better, but it's still PES 2021 carring all the issues of the vanilla version.
About 1080p and 240hz (i didn't know that there is a projector tha can produce 240hz!) I strongly suggest you to try the Ultra graphics mod. I prefer the visual fidelity and photorealism it provides, even if I play at 90Fps instead of 165.
Yo clearly don't know how modding works. Let's start with animations. There are animations that trigger rarely, or just don't trigger at all cause Konami decided to just leave them aside simply because it didn't work for their purpose when they created the game. And by this I mean that they were for example too long animations, or simply old ones that decided to deactivate them. If you did mod, you would know that some animations, in several games can be, in theory, simply activated by changing a binary value. Now... that doesn't mean that they EFFECTIVELY APPEAR in the game, cause you still have to give the game the info in which situation should trigger. Many of them might just be not only deactivated, but also have been deprecated and change by others in the code. Some others would appear only under certain ocassions depending on context of the player. Others my appear only with auto-feint ON/OFF etc. Like... there's too many variables in play. But many others, specially related to GK, will appear ocasionally in the game.
To be more specific, is also not only that you activate certain animations by changin a value in the dt13, there's also a lot of microanimations, or more likely blending animations, that will depend on your blending settings. That's why a lot of modders will tell you to use their full pack, cause maybe with a different dt18, that is where animation blending and aging (how the animation of certain action plays in the game) will be setted up in dt 18.
About ball physics, you're simply completely wrong. Obviously there's a base made by Konami, and obviously you can't change the formula of the ball physics, indeed, cause we don't have engine code. But there is a miriade of values to change in ball.o in constant_match.bin in the dt18. You can check this by yourself by simply picking the Editor tool and opening vanilla dt18 with it and check the bin I told you.
Now, this being said... Obviously modders will advertise their own gameplay with "new ball physics" or "new animations" and be half-true or exagerated, cause this changes probably are not so easy to perceive, and have not such an impact on gameplay. Sometimes they are small minor changes that make the gameplay change in very limited ocasions but are not that perceptible at first contact, and defenitely do not change THAT MUCH in terms of gameplay.
If you ask me, personally, what'd be more gamechanging in terms of gameplay, is having more than 3/4 speeds (Sprint, Run, Jog and walk) and most importantly, make the AI use different gradiations of speed more accordingly to the situations, and also make them vary in the stamina consumption. But we don't have the tools for that, so it is what it is. Also, how AI runs into a possition to create a new passing lane, giving short supports to passes, having correct marks, not having the CB running away from the mark as they do sometimes... THAT is gamechanger, and we don't see it so often cause it's not that easy to make. Even if it can be made to a certain extent, I insist, we are really have or hands tied up since we don't have the code and we don't know how the game works internally (at least not me) and which function calls which value through which memory direction, etc.
Those that have been working over this past years in modifying dt13 and exe have made great advancements and will probably have more insight into this, but at the end of the day, is navigating through hexadecimal code changing values totally blind and using as guide the few text references that appear in certain hex editors, translated from Hexadecimal to ASCII.
I repeat, it is NOT easy to mod this game. It runs on a 10 yo engine that was already kinda old tech back in the days, and was used specifically for making the last Metal Gear Solid, MGS:V Phantom Pain and it's prequel demo Ground Zeroes (in fact FOX engine is named like that not because of the TV channel, but because of the spy agency FOXHOUND found in Metal Gear Saga), so having an engine that was already not that good back in the days and that was done with an action game in mind, instead of a more broad approach or specifically for sports engine, it's not probably the best of the situations. If you add to that that no enough research was done to decrypt games/engine data as it was made with Frostbite/FIFA (EAFC)(with Frosty Toolsuit first and then FMM/FMT) with a big dedicated community to that... Well, we are pretty fucked up. And again, for what I heard Frostbite is way more accesible and easy to decrypt than FOX.
As I always say, we've got to accept the crude reality. PES 2021 was and is a better game in terms of vanilla base to get a decent gameplay. Is way easier to get good results that it is in FIFA, if you ask me, but is also way more limited in what and what not you can change and how you can change it. This doesn't mean that YOU CANNOT change several areas of the game, but it is way more difficult than doing so in FIFA. And in FIFA/EAFC, you can potentially tweak more things, but is a broken game, with a lot of deprecated values in it's internal files, and doing enough prowess to get a decent base can take you the whole year of lifespan that each annual installment has.
So, don't expect certain things to get better that whan you can get with the selection of mods you've got at hands, don't expect COMPLETELY NEW ANIMATIONS, but also, don't be so bold as to say that "nothing of that can actually be done". Is simply not so extensive as to be seen first glance.
