I agree with the OP so, so much. I've been very busy with school lately, so I haven't been keeping up with everything on the forums, but it does not surprise me in the least that a crafting pack beat out a pack full of supernaturally-oriented activities. I mean, the last time there was a pack that the players were to vote on, we ended up with a whole stuff pack centered around one of the top five most boring chores in the modern world (Laundry is right up there with Washing the Dishes by Hand, Sweeping, Mopping, and Mowing the Lawn on the top five of tedium and drudgery).
Realism players (family and single-life players both) get way more content than supernatural players in TS4, way more often. The heavy fragmentation and slow-drip of content for this game in general doesn't help. However, we also have a dev team who are biased toward softer, more "slice-of-life" themed content, and a loud contingent of the realism player base who actively protest against the presence of anything even slightly supernatural, but still want to buy basically every one of the packs that come out for the Build/Buy and CAS stuff.
The thing is, we supernatural players don't want much compared to what realism players already have to play with. Most of us can agree, we want at least the major core supernaturals in the game and properly fleshed out by the end of its run. We also want a few skills, activities, and jobs that relate to magical/sci-fi themes for both our supernatural sims and our normie sims. These are things that can be achieved in 2-3 more GP's or a GP and an EP at most. That's all we really want at minimum. We know we probably won't won't get an East Asian Mythology pack; or a pack where we can upgrade our rockets into full-on, "Yo, this is my ride AND my crib!" starships; or a Superhero/Mad Science pack; or pet dragons; or unicorns/pegasi; or centaur sims; or an entire pack of Medieval through 18th Century stuff for our fantasy world building pleasure. Many of us want some or all of those bigger things exploring and expanding on both old and new supernatural territory, but here we are fighting just to get some BASIC stuff that we should have HAD already!!
And why? Because a few people didn't like alien abductions, which were subsequently nerfed...just like ANYTHING remotely cool or challenging in TS4 when the Sob Squad whines that "It's too hard!!" or "I don't like weird things!" It's like someone decided to clone Caillou over and over and over, then let said army of whining clones play a Sims game and make all the decisions about how the game should be made going forward...(and if you don't know who Caillou is, a quick search will bring you to all the reasons people can't stand him in very, very short order.) Wasn't the entire stated point of things like GP's and giving players the ability to install packs in any order they want supposed to be that every individual player can set their game up with the features they want, skip the ones they don't, and add in ones they skipped later if they changed their minds? Well, that went out the window as soon as the first realism player had a pity party over their hunky digital husbando getting knocked up by E.T.
I sure hope Paralives doesn't wimp out on supernatural content like TS4 did when the Caillou Army gets to crying...
