I agree completely.
There's barely any randomness, or consequences, or anything bad in general. It's all happiness, sunshine and rainbows. Which makes it feel bland and wishy-washy.
I miss all the things that caused that in the previous games tremendously. Story progression, robbers, memories and so on. Even when something do happen in TS4 (Which is usually done by the player), then it barely does anything! Lost your spouse? Get a sad moodlet for a day or so, which easily gets overpowered by lots and lots of other moods and then it's forgotten. This is compared to the previous games when they acted heartbroken for longer and suddenly remembered this and started to cry.
A sim caught their partner cheating/being romantic with someone else? Here comes the moodlet...sometimes. While, yet again, in the previous ones they got upset and slappy while shouting.