I think when it comes to TS4 recycling content, it depends on how they do it. And in the last few packs, I was rather happy with what it meant. Because I actually like that this time around, what we get in a pack isn't all of that kind we'll ever get. People liked the foodstands, they keep adding to them, without making it a general focus of the pack. People liked active careers, they further experimented with them in Dine Out (and it's much better, Dine Out is honestly fun to me while retail isn't and the active careers too repetitive.. and the last few patches have fixed a lot of bugs in both DO and the vet career for me - in DO my employees never just stand around and when I go out to eat, or take my own pets to the vet, everything's pretty fast and smooth again, and no longer takes a ridiculous amount of time), then in a different way in CL and now again in the vet career. In fact as a person who loves careers, if they finally give us self-employment back, TS4 will be the best to me career-wise (but only if I can one day register my sim at City Hall or other as a gardener, painter, archaeologist, etc. - and on that note, I'm excited that for archaeology they added a nice perk that at least feels a bit like the chance cards related to TS3's self-employment system). They took the idea from GF to sell vacation supplies and made it a lot better by fusing it with the vendor table. And there are so many items to buy there. If that's in part because they didn't have to spend any time on actually making the vendor table, then I'm happy with that decision. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that recycling in these examples simply doesn't bother me because it's done so that they can add other things to these packs we didn't yet have, and the recycled content is usually a much improved version of the original.
