I also don't like the shortcuts they do for everything, but to me TS was always more of a caricature of life and i have long since burried the hope of it becoming more realistic.
Actually, i don't believe most sandbox players even want one. A life sim would be waaaaay mrore restricting. Jobs would be harder, sims would be complexer/harder to deal with and everything would take more time.
Take make up, hair and clothes for example. I would prefer my sim to dress up every morning and have to buy new clothes, to have to put on make-up (and have them react differently to their environment) and go to a hairdresser to change their look. Most sandbox players would be like "whyyyyy can't i do this in an instant? I want more time to decide what I want to do with my sim instead of them having to invest so much time into trivial things!!!"
Another thing is friendship. I saw a lot of complaints from EVERYONE at the beginning of TS4 how fast friendships decay and how they didn't want to invest time to keep them up. In reality, there are a lot of different types of friendships and while there are some friends you can not call for several weeks and they respect you need your privacy and like you nonetheless, there are also those people that start to grew apart if they spent less and less time with each other.
I actually want my sim to want to be friends with people instantly, because s/he likes them at first glance and also dislikes some for the same reason,but again, something sandbox players would protest against because it makes it harder to get your sims to do what you want.
I also don't want every sim to be able to get every job. I want job interviews, i want education that means something. Sandbox players want everything easily accessible.
Honestly, balancing sandbox and life sim has always been a struggle for TS and i think they should concentrate more on the life sim aspect, because there are other sandbox games out there but no life sim. But if TS5 was more like i wanted it, people would probably hate it even more than TS4 for being "restrictive" and "too hard".
That being said, TS4 doesn't even try to balance those two aspects and replaces them with a lot of watered-down RPG-elements. No, thank you.
