The "blurry pixelated big UI" is actually the correct one I believe. The one that you find correct is smaller than what the UI used to be in original The Sims. The "incorrect" one is what it used to be in the vanilla game.
I agree though that the UI is pixelated and messy looking. I don't reallly understand why EA didn't fix the buttons to show correctly on higher resolutions. Half of the buttons in the game have wrong background now so it looks jarring. I also hoped they'd upscale neighbourhood/expansion lots screens so they'd take entire screen space instead of having the black border around everything. It's honestly quite disappointing esp. since the guy behind FreeSO somehow managed to make The Sims Online UI work great on widescreen monitors AND improved graphics greatly while at it. It can be done, it just requires care from the developers.
Also I don't quite understand the reasoning behind using TS1 Complete Collection's rather ugly loading screen instead of the original one from the base game but I guess that's more of a taste question.
CastigaviI agree with you completely regarding pixelated/messy UI. I probably wouldn't have much of a problem with the larger UI and deeper zoom if all the buttons, text and sprites weren't so pixelated. For me it's highly visible and quite sharp pixelation. That's why I initially thought it must have been a bug of some kind, seeing as it's so different (and for me better) in 1080p.
I definitely acknowledge that it's been a wildly different experience for different users' screen sizes and resolutions, and there's an element of personal preference involved. I hope EA can do some tweaking or provide some configurable options so that the UI can work well for everyone.
The problem with the 1080p resolution thing is that the UI and the overall zoom of the game looks too small, and it's clearly not the intended look. The UI looks blurry on 4K because it's rendered on a different "layer", but it's supposed to look like that with those proportions and not the tiny size the 1080p resolutions have at the moment (which is how it looked when you forced the resolution ingame to 1080p in the disk versions, but is not the intended look). It's not a "how it looks more correct to you" thing because they clearly modified the UI to be bigger and consistent for all resolutions except for 1080p (unintentional).
I agree with the problems you describe, but I believe they're two separate (though equally important) issues: one being the UI is tiny at 1080p and doesn't scale using Alt+Enter; the other being the full screen UI is blurry and glitchy at 4K, which is the issue I'm focusing on with this thread.
When I originally described my issue, I think I described the 1080p situation as the 'good' one primarily because it was not blurry/glitchy. I hadn't personally considered size issues with 1080p at the time, but I absolutely hear that many, including yourself, have valid problems with the 1080p UI and I agree that they also need to be addressed.
I saw in today's patch notes that they're investigating adding screen resolution as a menu option. I hope this would mean they're aware of and considering all the different issues we've raised for various resolutions.
