Driver Madness

I'm mainly talking about the approach to the story, as we know the previous installments behind his mind were dark and gritty.

No. His ideas were implemented into the game, but the whole "60 FPS" ordeal forced the development team to take certain features out. As for everyone turning into Benjamin Button, I think that was just a change of direction for the Driver series, which is good in some sense, but I don't think Driver was an appropriate "test subject" for doing so.

No, Driver has always been a game "for the masses". Martin said that himself about Driver 1 — it was a family game he said. And so is Driver SF. It can be for younger people, but if you take a closer look, it can be for older people too. Funny thing is, in the DSF multiplayer, I'm pretty much the only person under 30. Some of them even have their own Muscle cars, one of the dudes has Tanner's Challenger in the same colours! What I noticed also is that all of them have been there since Driver 1. That's the original Driver family/generation! Nothing has changed really

Not really, no.

I'm pretty sure he sported a lot of the stuff himself, along with the team.

Seeing as one of the reasons that he left Atari was that because he didn't like how they tried to change the artistic direction of the game, and that he mentioned many times that he liked Ubisoft's creative freedom, I don't think that this makes any sense. Yeah, San Francisco is more accessible than previous installments, but it doesn't look dumbed down (yeah, there were invisible walls and stuff, but it's minor).