Alternative Story Progression?

Awesome's Story Mode, which is what its version of progression is called, takes a different approach to things than NRaas SP does. The events that Story Mode pushes must be acted out on screen, whereas SP reports on the results of progression by way of "story" notifications whether they really happen in an animated way or not, and thus can make things progress townwide much faster and in a more orderly or, if the player prefers though reachable mod options, a more chaotic manner.

I tried Story Mode before NRaas and ended up with not quite but almost the same ghost town syndrome that so often gets complained about under EA's version. A couple of my sims in an early generation had a total of something like two others attending their high school for example, and there weren't more than a similar very small number of children and toddlers behind them even though I had plenty of what I thought was suitable housing and careers to attract newly arriving sim households and for the existing population to move around and make babies on their own. I'm sure some of this might have been due to player error on my part, or not setting things up as well as they may have been required the Awesome way, but the idea of posting questions on that forum at the time sounded about as enticing as a series of root canals (no thanks). :/