I think it has more to do with EA's laziness than it does with them creating a more 'family friendly' game... the developers simply don't care about the players anymore. They only care about making money at this point... The Sims has become a huge cash cow for EA, so they're milking it to death, while giving us very minimal content.
By their logic (which is true), they don't need to "waste" resources or money on anything you mentioned because players are willing to buy whatever they throw at us, regardless of the quality... sadly, we allow this to happen over and over again. Since the beginning, we've proven to them that we'd buy anything Sims related, so they figure they could release packs with less and less content/features every time.
It's sad, but true... us players are (unfortunately) partially responsible for EA's laziness and greediness. They noticed a trend that we set and have taken advantage of it ever since... and now the packs are lacking quality because they know we'll buy them anyway.
