Have you guys tried engaging with game mechanics?
If you have bad luck...don't do things that are affected by bad luck. It's a video game, that's the challenge, you have bad luck today- sorry, probably shouldn't go fishing or try to craft stuff or cook. Order out. Raise a skill that won't be too impacted by luck. Work on something else. Or use one of the *multiple* in-game ways to raise luck. Call in to work and go beg the gnome statue for help, ask Spruce Almighty, or see if Todd has a cure. Todd doesn't have a cure, but you found an aura bush seed? Well what luck, because the aura bush has a luck boosting aura. Put it by your Sim's bed and every night at 2am when the Luck resets, it'll help you out.
Bad balance? Do activities that increase balance...
Ailments? Go to the naturopath- it's a phone interaction/rabbit hole. Costs 1500 Simoleons. Too expensive? Go to Todd and buy cures. He doesn't have the cure? Learn the skill and make your own. Wait a day and check his stock again. Don't like waiting? Build a store with Get to Work or Businesses and Hobbies that stocks them. Half of the ailments have positive effects, anyway! Utilize their positives while dealing with the negatives! Ailment cures are dirt cheap. Stock up and put a medicine cabinet of them in your home somewhere. Tada, ailments are solved forever.
There are solutions to all these things- you just have to actually PLAY THE GAME and ENGAGE WITH ITS CONTENT to find them. People jump way too quickly to "This needs to be nerfed and made easier". They finally give us harder content to engage with and all anyone wants is to have it removed, instead of engaging with it. Your sim is sick, you go to the doctor. Your sim has an ailment, you...?
Here is a guide on Balance and Luck:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/133966349
Here is a guide on Ailments:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/134030814
Intern Waffle, what you've described and the way you've described it doesn't sound like engaging with game mechanics so as much as it sounds like being slavish to them.
There's the imagination/storytelling aspect of the game to consider here. The game mechanics ideally should allow enough wiggle room for a player to freely construct whatever narrative(s) they choose to create for their households at their leisure. When the mechanics are loose enough to allow for that, then the player can embrace the mechanics that do exist and incorporate them into their narratives.
But when the mechanics become too intrusive and stifling, that all goes out the window, and you have the game dictating what the player needs to be doing at every turn, essentially turning it into a checkpoint/objective driven game.
Besides, it's perfectly possible to introduce new and satisfying gameplay mechanics without slapping yet another system onto the already mile-long simology panel (with all packs and everything enabled). They did it most recently with Businesses & Hobbies by introducing small business gameplay, and they did that without imposing another system on us.
If they're going to continue expanding this game, then I'd much prefer they'd continue along the lines of B&H rather than struggle to come up with yet another new system-based pack. It's getting ridiculous. At this point, I'm half-expecting them to introduce a new "skin dryness" system wherein if you're not applying moisturizing lotion at least five times a day, your Sim will dry up and turn into dust.
The game isn't "dictating what you have to do" by offering you content that has a feature that has consequences, and then the feature happens, and there's consequences.
Your sim wakes up and is hungry. Is the game "dictating what you have to do" because now you eventually have to feed them? C'mon.
That's funny, I don't seem to recall complaining about the hunger bar. Are you trying to to draw a parallel between having to eat when you're hungry and having to wait a day to do things you might like to do because some luck goddess isn't smiling favorably upon you that day?
Look, if you enjoy limiting mechanics, you do you, but you might've considered that other players might not be down with that sort of thing before writing what reads a lot more like lecture to other players than it does an offering of well-meaning advice.
