Dirt Rally is a recent Codemasters game that is excellent, if you're into rallying. It's almost as good as Richard Burns Rally, and miles ahead of any other rally game/sim.
Dirt Rally is not for me, it's like Project Cars unrealistic hard while not be very realistic, in contrary to Grandprix Legends and Assetto Corsa. Dirt 3+4 with this Ken Block shit or random generated boring generic tracks - no thanks. DiRT 2 is still the best in presentation (it looks better in 4K on PC than DiRT Rally, see YouTube videos), DiRT 2 has a nice single campaign, a nice menu, great tracks in 8 different regions, a great physics engine and car deformation and so much more - I don't get why their newer games all are a lot less fun to drive and in general build together so lackluster. Maybe they should take a break for a year, not releasing yearly updates to F1, DiRT (and DiRT). A new DiRT 2 and a new GRID 1 and a new DriveClub would be awesome - do it.
Dirt Rally is probably the most realistic rally simulator out there, or at least second after Richard Burns Rally. There's nothing that's comparable to those two out there.
And it feels alright to me compared to my experience driving in low grip conditions on dirt, snow and ice (on traffic and doing drifting on empty lots). Also when watching replays it looks like real rally driving (most car games don't look at all like the real thing when watching replays).
But rallying is really friggin' difficult. Richard Burns Rally is probably even more difficult than Dirt Rally. It takes a while to get a hang of the loose surface and the lateral dampening from packing snow and dirt in front of the tyres.
But once you catch the drift (pun intended), it becomes nice and fluent. You need to flick the car in nice and early, get going sideways and then modulate the drift with throttle and brake. I really like the FWD and RWD cars in Dirt Rally, the 4WD's are not as intuitive as in RBR (but that might be because they don't model the 2000's era computer controlled center differentials).
The big difference to driving sims on tarmac is that you don't really spend a lot of time full throttle. Instead you accelerate to a decent speed and then modulate the throttle to compensate for changes in the track surface. Braking is also similar, to slow down you give very little brake pedal with lots of modulation and only go full brakes when doing left foot braking (right foot on throttle).
I can't speak about Dirt or F1 or WRC games because I haven't put much time into them. I'm more into simulation than racing games.
They should make a game for an era like "the V6 era" and give us a supported racing game, with DLC of current drivers or setups per season, but the core game is built as a community, and iterated upon.
A new game each year is just like map packs that divide player bases.