I think the other thing your survey is missing is that new players won't have any nostalgia/predjudices based on the previous games, and therefore whether or not they'll like the game will be based not on comparisons to previous editions, but on the game itself.
I'm one such new player - though at this point it's been a little over a year. Talking about what a previous edition did "better" or not than TS4 is honestly just noise to me. I'm not going to go play TS3, or TS2. At most, I might go play The Sims Medieval - and that's only because that was actually my first Sims game... but even there, I only played for a bit and then forgot about it through two computer changes - and I picked it up from the Bargain Bin.
Is TS4 without problems? Certainly not. There are bugs and places where the game fights you for certain story lines due to lack of significant consequences, and yes, the personalities are shallow. But I never thought that needing some imagination to play a sandbox game was a bad thing? I dunno, maybe because I play TTRPG's rather than computer RPGs, so everything's normally on me to tell my character's story, rather than it being decided by a combination of scripts, randomizers and algorithms.
