I have a few questions about sims.

One of your questions was about the timeline of the 4 games.  Now, I never played the previous releases, but from what I've read, I get the impression that with TS4, they've given up on an actual timeline or story.  It seems like now they've just chosen various familiar faces and names, put them in the world, and any story is up to you.  The best example, is trying to make sense of the Goth family in context of what they were like in previous releases.  She's back now?  And younger than her husband?  Starts on Day 1 of Young Adult, but has a Teen daughter and Child son?  It's more like they just decided what old characters to bring back, because players liked them:  Everyone loves Bella, the Calientes were really popular too, the BFF household was pretty interesting, bring back the Landgraabs but name the son after his uncle and confuse everyone, etc.