If you're on PC and Mac I recommend these mods to make the emotion system better:
by Bienchen. This mod makes the mood your sim is in impact more when they're developing a skill, are in school etc.
Meaningful stories by roburky, which I think you've probably already heard of so I dont need to link or explain.
Some
mood replacements mods like:
. This makes your sims embarassed when their hygiene is low. Personally I dont play with this one as I like to have some needs still be uncomfortable to work with Roburkys uncomfortable overhaul in meaningful stories.
. This makes your sims get bored when their fun is low instead of tense. This does actually make gameplay a bit easier since they dont get the "too tense to do this" restriction. But also, it seems like it affects their social conversations to be more boring and they dont make as good impressions. cant confirm that though as I use A LOT of mods to impact the social convos
There is a mod that makes your sims
sad when their social need is low, and I cant seem to find it anymore. if anyone can find it, please link it to me!
Anyway, you can download which ones you like to suit your game taste.
I also recommend
Have some personality please which makes your sims do a lot more
dramatic social interactions autonomously. The modder polarbearsims also have some additional mods for autonomous breakups and divorces (based on their moods). Zero has a mod with
autonomous breakups that requires the hurt or bitter sentiment if that suits you more. This mod make your sims lives a lot more dramatic, like an evil townie cussing them out and fighting them (or just some rando having a bad day), their spouse breaking up etc. which in turn makes your sims mood a lot worse
In my eyes the sims 4 will always be superior because of the emotion system, because thats how I prefer to play. The lack of emotions bugged me in the sims 3, so the emotions really make the game for me in the sims 4. But, the vanilla emotion system is just too unbalanced, so I need mods to fix it. Its quite sad for console and non-mod players, because the emotion system is so good and its literally just the game balancing issues that make it so so many players ignore it or hate it. I wish Maxis fixed it in vanilla, because I dont think they need to add a lot of stuff to fix it. It's more of a go-through-code-for-buffs-and-adjust-the-values-kinda job. So I guess it would be a bit tedious for the developers, but its not a hard job like a lot of the bug fixes for bugs with unknown causes are.
