By what you describe, I think you may be playing the game on a low end computer? Because for me that introduction video stops right when I press a key, I never have to sit that through. And sims are constantly doing things with high free will enabled. They don’t leave the house autonomously, that’s true, but I don’t mind that. It’s a game, we’re supposed to play them. As for mods, the NRaas ones (Overwatch and Errortrap) help performance so you might want to try that after all? Just make sure to clean the five cache files before playing.