Freeplay is your typical Skinner's box. It does have a lot of good features, including an open world and the ability to play all the Sims, but it's awful as well unless you really like the real time playing (with the ability to spend real world $$ to speed things up). But I don't like that mobile game model, and Freeplay doesn't even try to be subtle about the massive amount of money it's trying to make on basic gameplay. At least Fallout Shelter, which is pretty much the same thing, tries to be less obvious about it.
It wouldn't surprise me if Freeplay both cost less to maintain and makes more money than Sims 4. It's probably why they now have two mobile Sims games and are not worried about them competing against each other.
I think, though, what's most frustrating to me is so many of the small features were just base game in Sims 2 and Sims 3 yet we've been told for years that those features are too advanced for their game engine. If that's the case, they should have worked on a game engine that could handle those basic features.