This is one of the reasons I actually prefer games that aren't trying to be so realistic and simulating every little aspect of the real life, that the game becomes so complicated it's nearly impossible to have a good AI. And a bad AI is a quick way to ruin the whole experience, specially from the realism aspect. The other reason I can't get into these overly complicated sim games is the time it takes to learn the mechanics of the game. I own both this and the Franchise Hockey Manager 3 games and have tried some of the Football Manager games that have come out every year. One main problem: I can never commit the time necessary to learn the mechanism enough to not feel like things are happening randomly. As a busy person, it's hard to commit 20+ hours just to learn the game, and many more just to play a few seasons.
I would love to see simpler management type games that focus on the key aspects of a good sim (like focus on 6-10 skills for each player instead of the 20+ and their happiness and royalty and their suddenly random ask to go to a different team...) Not only this makes the game much quicker to learn and play (so more people can play it) but also you can have a much better AI that would almost feel human, simply because the rules are simple enough for our current technology to be able to do the proper analysis and calculations.
In that sense, board games are a great example, due to technological limitations and also time limitations and need for simplicity so new people can get into it easily, create a situation where these games have to focus on a few important gameplay elements as opposed to trying to handle a ton of different details. Now if you could apply that principle to an computer game where you don't have the technological limitations (aside from the AI limitations as mentioned above), then you can have a game that not only a lot more people can get into, but the game itself would be much better with things like AI that can be perfected much easier.