Yeah, you made a good decision, BAL's great. In terms of difficulty I'll just throw my thoughts in: I played all last year on Professional and frankly got bored about 10 seasons in cos it was just too easy. This year though I changed it to Top Player and played 5 seasons like that. It was more realistic since I wasn't winning every game 5-0 and scoring all 5, but at times it was incredibly frustrating since the AI achieved these realistic scores with some ridiculous cheating.
My advice: start on Professional and play a few seasons like that, especially since your player is so rubbish to start off with. You can change the difficulty at the end of each season, so it's not the end of the world if it's too easy.
As for camera, I play in wide, since this is what I play every other mode in, and this will probably apply to you too if you've played a lot of ML. Just play around with it