I am not a SimCity fan either and neither an open world fan because I need to be able to control my sims and make plans for their lives and not just in one family because I need to create a neighborhood story too. This isn’t possible in TS4 and never will be. Therefore I stopped playing it a long time ago. TS2 was the best Sims game for me.
I am also not a builder or a decorator. But if I were I would instead play games like Design Home and Covet Fashion from Crowdstar. So I also don’t really understand people who buy all the expensive stuff for TS4 just to build and decorate. TS4 is just too primitive anyway for such things IMO even though building and designing is easy because the game prevents from creating ugly sims and so on. I would just need more freedom to create what I wanted instead of all this “security” if I wanted to build or decorate.