Neighborhood stories experiences?

I at first let it run wild for my unplayed sims but soon came to a conclusion that it's way too aggressive for my game (alternating between long lifespan and aging off). Just constant mass adoptions followed by death. It really liked to fill whole households with babies, then kill off the parent(s), then my MCC had the babies adopted by random families. It became a huge mess. The pet adoption rate was completely out of control too.

So I now have the features disabled as a default and only manually enable them when I feel like it. I wish it had some sort of setting for the frequency of events but for now my solution is just to alternate between enabling/disabling.