Island Living; is it lacking?

It's tolerable. The graphics are amazing, and it's also full of brilliant story opportunities for me. I like the cleaning up the islands thing, but it needs also to degrade faster than it does. My sim just picked up and dropped a single thing of trash for a real half an hour and the game claimed I'd cleaned up the entire island, as the picking up trash was marked as cleaning but somehow dropping it didn't make the island worse. Mermaids are no worse than aliens, if a bit buggy.