URGENT Hobbies and Business Feedback

When I said that Get to Work, Dine Out, and Cats & Dogs had been pushed into legacy status, I did not mean that they lost value or stopped working. What I meant is that they were treated as legacy content in the technical sense. There was no effort to integrate what already existed with what was added, no refactoring of older systems to improve cohesion, and no attempt to reuse mechanics that were already in the game, such as the Maintenance skill and Restocking system, which could have been reworked into visible skills and incorporated into Business & Hobbies. There was also no attempt to bring the improvements from small businesses into the older systems, like being able to open and configure aspects of a business from anywhere or define a business logo. The result is that two systems now coexist while dealing with similar themes but using different logic, menus, and behaviors, without any communication between them. This is exactly the kind of treatment that legacy features receive in complex software.

I fully understand that it is not commercially viable to refactor every business system, and I also understand that each pack needs to maintain its own identity to remain appealing as a separate product. My suggestions point toward ways to build coherence without requiring a complete overhaul of existing content or a significant increase in development cost. I am not proposing new features. What I am proposing is that the features we already have work together within the context of these packs, preserving the individual value of each one while avoiding redundancies and inconsistencies that weaken the overall experience.

What stands out to me is that The Sims 4 has already shown that it can integrate old and new systems when it chooses to. The genealogy overhaul before Reality & Legacy and the improvements to PlantSims with Enchanted by Nature are clear examples of how older systems can be revisited and aligned with new content in an elegant way, without losing their identity and without requiring a full rebuild. That is why it feels strange that Business & Hobbies went in the opposite direction and created a parallel system that completely ignores the previous ones, even though it deals with the exact same themes.

In the end, my point is not that the older packs lost relevance. My point is that they were treated as if they were outside the scope of evolution, and this leads to redundancy, inconsistency, and a loss of cohesion. That concerns me more as a design direction than as an isolated issue with this specific pack.