I'm sorry about your losses, OP. While I haven't experienced the exact same thing myself, I also use this game a lot to calm down, cope with things that aren't going too well, and imagine a better world, and I'm glad that they're releasing more and more expansions to give me new opportunities to do so.
However, at this point I would be fine with new content being pushed back in favour of bug fixes and improvements to already existing packs, because for every single one of them (even my favourites), I can think of at least one thing that would make them feel more complete or better as a whole. My biggest disappointment yet was Cats & Dogs, one of the things I was looking forward to the most, but then became one of my least favourite EPs because of how little you can actually do with your pets outside of CAS. It's all show over substance with TS4, and even the show falls flat sometimes because of technical issues.
I would never recommend this game to a friend, at least not in its current state. That's what I keep telling the developers in their surveys, while I myself am pretty much addicted to it, it's just too broken and incomplete right now to be recommended to someone who isn't already used to its flaws. Watching Friday's Maxis Monthly and seeing the redesigns of the pack covers, main menu and loading screen made me think: "Okay, but why are they fixing things that aren't broken instead of those that actually are, and have been for years in some cases?"
Yet hope is not lost - not for me, anyway. Despite still not being anywhere close to perfect, the game definitely is improving. Some features that were thought to be impossible or incompatible with the game's engine not too long ago have since been worked in, others that were missing from packs we expected them in (such as tans in Seasons) were eventually implemented in other ways. The developers' priorities seem off at times, but sometimes they come back and surprise us, and that's why I'm staying optimistic for the future of TS4.
