Yes, the deja-vu you think you’re feeling is real because we’re in autopilot mode now; I doubt we’ll ever see anything original again going forward, nothing that isn’t a carbon copy repeat of a season set we haven’t already seen.
But respectfully (and I cannot stress my respectfully-respectfulness enough),
I know that most everyone besides myself has nothing but sheer, utter contempt for cross-country and just cannot help themselves from squeezing in shots at it here and there, but if there was ever a time you had to do an A800 Extreme Cross Country Trial, isn’t this the season to do it? Sure, we’ve seen this movie a time or two before, during seasons that could have instead featured another car type combo more appropriate for less-forgiving seasons and saved more durable car type combos capable of handling harsher environments for times like magical English winters, just like right now (hey, what a coincidence). And Offroad and Extreme Offroad are the best fits for a winter XC trial, no? Who besides myself would squeal with glee at a D500 Cult Classic Cross Country Winter Trial? Or perhaps a robust S2 Extreme TrackToy Cross Country Winter Trial catches your fancy? Either of those beauties sound better or moar funner, hmm? Let’s see a show of hands; anyone? Anyone? (Bueller…?) No? Oh, not so much, I guess? (I mean, can you just imagine the tears?) Ah, well then, …okay, just think about those two little lovelies you could be but are not nor will you be suffering through while you breeze effortlessly through the snow drifts in one of your warm 'n cozy Baja-hahas this Trial.
I don’t really understand what all the stinkeye-ing at winter is all about anyway, as they totally nerfed winter to begin with to satisfy all the bellyaching coming from the hardcore S2 Rhee-rhee-rhee crowd. There’s no slippery ice, inclement condition-related slowdowns on the roads are marginal, and the snow gives +grip should anyone have the misfortune of taking a step or two off the pavement, for crying out loud. You don’t even have to fear S2 cross-country or dirt anymore, in any season, haven’t had to since shortly after launch. Winter has basically been reduced to just being a visual variant period, where everything in-game is just white.
Ah, but cross-country… it’s just too dull, is it? Well, it definitely has the worst variety overall, having the fewest number of routes across the board (oh, save for the drag strips 
). And yes, to be fair, Street and “Dirt” (which I call “Dirt Road” thanks to still being 40-50% asphalt as it is) just narrowly total ahead of XC in the base game, so okay we’ll call that ‘even’ (R-26, D-20, XC-19, S-21), but it gets totally shafted in the DLC ― you’d need to combine both expansion’s XC route totals together just to get into double digits. So if your eyes are glazing over because the XC Trial just seems so dull and overly familiar, well, it’s because it is!
[//Warning: poor analogy attempt dead ahead\]
When you only ever eat at one of three specific restaurants, of course you’re gonna tire pretty quickly of the joint with only three or four items on the menu (XC) where by in comparison the menus at the other two joints (Road & Dirt) are approximately three or four times longer and have multiple pages with pop-up pictures, a desserts and drinks specials insert (top shelf), and even color-by-number Lady Gaga placemat menus for the kids WITH those teeny-tiny boxes of little crayons…brand new boxes of unused crayons. Crayola. Yes! For both kids! The latter two restaurants with the menu frills and whatnot are luxurious. That’s what I hear, anyway, though you’d know better than I since I’m forever-trapped in the XC joint across the way with the wee, tiny, no-nothing menus, not even a used, colored-in Gaga menu for the two kids to share… (
) Admittedly, though… yeah, I feel the redundant, dully-dullness, too. 
All of that though, our seeing far more action on the roads than off them, that’s all okay, really …because believe me when I say that my eyes do the exact same flipping thing, glazing the bejeezus over and rolling waaaaay back into my head in dulldum-boredum every single time I do yet another S2 Super-Hyper-StarTrek-Warp9.9-TwitchyTwitch-Car Astomoor/Bamburgh/Moorhead type-thing, going 'round and 'round and 'round in two-second circles over and over and over again (that can’t be dull!) Oh, or ― ugh ― nighttime S2 StreetRaining runs. “For extra excessive misery, just add snow!” (Remember that scene in “The DaVinci Code,” where the killer albino monk is just wailing away, beating his back to a bloody pulp with a whip? That torturous scene is Brother Squryl every single time he runs S2 StreetRaining in the pitch-black snow, but I digress…)
To each his own, though, right? Your Heaven on Earth is someone else’s Seventh Circle of Hell. Nothing wrong with just not liking something, not at all ― the difference is, well it seems to me at least, that typically anyone prefering the flat 'n dry will be sure to make their dissatisfaction known without fail should something other than their all-time ultimate preferred preference comes up whereas by contrast, when faced with yet another dully-Dullsville-dull Asphalt Adventure, the offroad-preferring extreme minority of one (just me, right?) always seems to muster things up and just does it. Each race is like what, two and a half seconds long? Three? Three and a half seconds. Sitting for my covid shot took longer than what most races in this game take to finish. Hell, by the time you finish reading my monthly rant here, you’d have started the second race by now!
Now of course, all of the above is said with laughter, loves n’ kisses…but in all dead seriousness, what part of this game hasn’t gotten totally dully-Dullsville-dull, all stale and moldy-like? *(And this slow-dripping the new exclusives, now just two a month ― another trend btw now on repeat it seems ― is only making this Dullsville ennui cake just that much more stale and moldy-like…and the Hot Wheels NothingNotMuchBurger only added to the dissaboredum rather than negate any of it.*
) Really though, at this point now, the ennui is just baked in the cake, all the way around. Everything being equal, it’s no longer worth mentioning… so let’s just get on with it! Race the race, already!
I used the CLK GTR for the S2 race. Too easy. 
