Oh, what a cute world this is! I agree, taking one's time with a world is sometimes the best approach. I've been working on mine for eons (didn't work on it for a few years, though) and am now slowly working on getting it finished. I've discovered that checking and rechecking routing can be a very slow and tedious process but it's better to spend the time doing it right than to end up with an unplayable world later.
I couldn't help but notice what you said about limiting your store content to make CAW work okay. I have problems with that too so what I've done is have two instances of my game, one I use for playing and the other for building and testing things. To set it up all you have to do is rename your The Sims 3 folder in the My Documents section of your game then run the launcher and a brand new instance will be created. Then you can put any necessary mods in that instance and you'll have a much faster load for building and testing as well as much less trouble with CAW. If I use my play game for CAW it takes forever for CAW to load and exit plus the metadata crashes at a ridiculous rate, like about every other time I try to use the search function on it. Having a build version also gives me a mostly mod-free environment to make sure everything is functioning as it should be. I do have a few mods in it like Master Controller, Overwatch, Debug Enabler and Error Trap plus a few more I find necessary because those will let me know about problems I might otherwise miss, but otherwise it's a clean game.
