After playing a few races, Driveclub is a very...strange fit. It's the most narrow slice of audience I've seen a racing game target. Not really an arcade racer, with penalties for course and car collisions, so you can't really say it appeals to major Motorstorm fans or any casual racer. Not really a sim, as there's no tuning or options to turn off safety components on the car, so it's not going for the upper level Gran Turismo/Forza crowd.
This is an arcade-like racer, tuned to be more in line with sims, that really isn't for die hard sims or die hard casual racers, but for someone who fiddles occasionally with GT/Forza and wants sim elements in their arcade racers.
It doesn't surprise me that Jeff, who hates clinical racers like GT and has fallen out of love with Forza, would hate this game. Or if someone who loves Motorstorm would hate this game. Or a large portion of the gaming audience hated this game.
It's actually kind of perfect for me, but yeah, I can easily see why someone would not like the game. They should have gone all out Ridge Racer-style gameplay. But what it is, yeah, it's good. I have no idea why they thought targeting this narrow of an audience was a good idea though.