Nice review, and fully agreed to it being a 'play-for-an-hour-then-put-it-away!!' shallow type of game.
I must say I really like the easy means of engaging into an event and the freedom involved in choosing your route. True, map reading is very distractive, especially at those insane speeds (actually, I think the driver's seat is taken up with nitro as well, explaining the lack of humanoids); however, if I'm not mistaken I heard Atomic talk about getting to know the environment, and evolve on choosing routes. This can actually serve as a great challenge and a significant goal of the game.. but then again, familiarizing with the environment at those speeds is going to take ages!! In any case, those TINY flashing street signs at the top are far from ideal, so this is something for the dev team to evolve on themselves.
Talking about the dev team brings me to my final remark. My guess at the constant bloat of slowmo's is that it is - in combination with a big seemless environment - simply too computationally involved to simulate the crash in real-time. While this is fairly speculative, it could account for the lack of a simple "turn off slowmo" option similar to the action cam in the Need For Speed series.
Cheers