In terms of their first effort, EA MMA was definitely better.
I'm not crazy about the FNC team shifting over to UFC, and the main reason is they focused on a very casual version of boxing and never adequately addressed some core issues with the game.
I will give an example of why I feel this development team is not the most promising for EA's first UFC game. In Fight Night 4, there was an issue of guys being able to connect an insane amount of punches and not lose stamina to where you punch yourself out. The bottom line, if you connect, you basically don't lose much stamina. Many complained about this so the FNC team tried to address it but out of the box you could still throw 120+ punches a round and still have good stamina throughout the fight.
Here's where (to me) things really went down hill. They released a patch and series of tuners that eventually tried to resolve the mega punching issue by coding the game so that you randomly miss punches. That's how they addressed it. Even if you had an opening for a flush counter, there was a possibility that you miss because the connection % became random. There was no focus on adjusting a fighter's stamina so that if you throw as many punches as possible, you pay for it with fatigue.
That's just one example of what I would call turning a blind eye coding. Instead of getting under the hood and fixing a long time issue, they created a quick fix that in turn produces more headaches.