Dine Out - sims won't sit at table, eat food and can't pay bill

I'm having really significant issues with Dine Out. With or without Carl's Reload, and with or without a new vanilla save, I have the same problems. Basically, it is back to the original chaos of when it was first released. The sims have to order via the table and no waiter ever talks to them to take the order. Waiters do take other sims' orders. Everyone in the restaurant is running around playing with clay, tablets, toys, talking to other sims they didn't get seated with, taking pictures with their phones and interacting with objects on the lot. Sometimes food is not delivered until all the food slots have filled up in the kitchen.  As soon as the food arrives, all sims pick up their food from their table and either eat standing or find somewhere else to sit, like a bench, or a different table. The sim I'm playing doesn't actually eat their food unless I order them to, others in their group don't eat at all and keep looking at the menu, and the other npc guests just drop uneaten food on the floor after a few minutes and leave or continue to do other things. When the sims I'm playing with finish eating they have no option to pay the bill, only to give up the table as if they never were served and if I don't do that quickly, someone else is just seated at the table. Most of these issues were fixed by EA long ago. Any other bad behavior was generally fixed by Carl, but even with Carl's Dine Out Reloaded mod all these same behaviors persist. 
I've also tried multiple restaurants resulting in variations of the same behaviors. This was happening prior to the most recent hotfix patch on Oct 1 as well as now. Sometimes an LE was thrown but not every time, and since it was vanilla I didn't have MCCC running so only had the txt file, not the HTML.