retired_FaultyFate

I don't see anything conflicting in short slow counter attacking formation. In general I believe this is the setup any midtable team can easily adopt, so it probably should be used as the starting point. Using quick tempo (as in-game hint suggests) will result in lots of bad decisions, because tempo refers to how fast player should pass, cross, shoot etc. once he gets the ball, not how fast player should move. Only a few teams at the beginning can adopt quick style. Short passing does not mean players should never try long passes. It's just general instruction "If you don't have a good option to organize fast attack yourself, play short, don't just send long ball up and hope someone can pick it up". And counter attack box basically tells player "If you have a break chance, go for it".

I admit, this does not come from manual (at least this way), but it did not take me too long to understand it from experience, and frankly it's logical and very similar to real life approach.

Sorry to tell you, but 80% of those errors are because of either instructions you have given to players, or the fact that sometimes players have form shortage and you need to catch it up by constantly monitoring training performance, interacting with media, etc. Hence, they are under your control. Time wasting slider is the bad one as SI seems to have strange view on how time should be wasted, but setting it to rarely reduces stupid back passes to almost 0 (I haven't seen one for a few seasons).

Summary. The sliders are not very well explained, but if you are ready to observe things (not necessary in full mode) it does not take too long to understand main principles of the game. And these forums provide a lot of help if you don't seek for the perfect tactic, but rather pick up useful ideas. From my experience, reading forums for a couple days saved me a lot of nerves and time I would have spent figuring things out myself.