I think we as players see and feel the effect of their allocated budgets a lot in their packs. The reason why Growing Together and Horse Ranch might feel like game packs is probably because they spent a lot of their resources adding Infants and Horses to the game and they don't want to increase their budget to make the packs "feel" more like expansion packs.
They do seem to make more requested features for the game now, which I do like. We see less "weird" and "innovative" packs now.
But some of the more requested features that people want for The Sims 4 does require a fair bit of development which in turn prevents them from releasing them as game packs, so I think that's the reason why we have not seen game packs for a while.