The bugs spoil what would otherwise have been a good iteration in the franchise.
I'm not wild about the 'you must use travel to go to another part of the neighbourhood or load a different lot' but with a modern gaming PC, the loading times are fast enough that it's open-ish.
But yeah, where it fails for me is when there are glitches, things don't work properly, and it takes months for things to get fixed, if they get fixed at all.
I'd much rather that there was a big clearing out of bugs than get new content and some bug fixes. I'd much rather that new content took longer to arrive and was relatively free of bugs.
This probably isn't economically viable though, because if there isn't any new content being made, presumably there's a big cross-section of staff who have nothing to do except wait until the next update ships or, they can get started on new content but can't finish because other people are busy working on testing, fixing, testing, and more fixing.
However, I'll tell you what else isn't economically viable. Expansion packs which sell less than previous ones. Every customer who turns away from newer expansion packs because of the bugs or other annoying issues that still exist in the old ones, even when they're massively discounted, that's a lost sale that could not be accounted for. Sure, it's possible to get an idea of what budget to pour into an expansion pack so that there will be a net profit, but it might not be the profit that was hoped for.
I would speculate that the reason why an expansion pack, game pack, and stuff pack were announced earlier this year was because the number of units (of base game or existing expansions) being shifted, did not match expectations. To keep people interested in the game, it's got to have even more content. At least, that what seems to be the driving direction at the moment.
I haven't bought Island Living because I'm not happy about the quality of the game, and more content isn't going to fix that.
