I do hate looking for sims in the gallery. There are a lot of strange trends that happen. People tend to make them super sexy, ultra thin, or do this weird big eye small head thing to women. Also, male sims are always made super buff or they tend to all look the same to me.
I usually spend time making a bunch of families and single sim households and then I place them in houses to fill my neighborhood, next time I start a new save I have them to fill houses again so that I don't have to go through the process of finding adequate sims on the gallery again.