Tall Teens, Babies stuck to the crib, and the launch version of the careers.
I like that Teens are more on the 15-to-17-year-old side than the 13-to-15-year-old side height-wise this time around. Sure, it could be confusing in the beginning sometimes because they didn't put the age tag on sims until sometime after launch, but with the age tag, everything's gravy. And before anyone goes "Oh, but Teens should be shorter because my kid was 16 and not up to their final height yet," I was at my final adult height at about 15. Many young men might not hit their full stature until their early 20's, but most young women hit their adult maximum between 15 and 18 years old...and, yes, some teenaged boys are very tall for their age. My big brother was around 6 feet (~183 cm.) before he was even out of high school. So, yeah, I'm really comfortable with the tall Teens, and I just don't get why so many people can't wrap their head around the idea of a teenager being around the same height as a grown adult.
As for the Babies, my experiences with sims (even in a game with no active script mods, mind you) putting the Babies on the floor if they weren't near a crib and wanted to go do something else besides hold the little ankle-biter really do color my perception of this topic. I never really liked Babies in this franchise, since they don't really do any of the interesting things actual babies do and aren't even available as playable sims. TS2, they were always ending up on the floor and a ton of time was wasted toting them all around the house to get to the fridge to feed them if I didn't do my ultimate nursery set-up (crib, changing table, fridge, trash can/garbage chute, attached to a bathroom with a counter-bound sink, right next to the parents' room); TS3, they're blanket burritos; TS4, they finally realized that most people just leave the kid in the crib 99.9% of the time anyway and glued them there. That's it. Babies have always been treated like objects in this franchise. Always. They were just more portable in TS2 and TS3, so it was easier to pull the wool over people's eyes. They'll always be objects until the day when they are made playable, with skills and personalities of their own. So, yeah, keep 'em glued to the crib unless you're gonna make them into fun playable characters.
Finally, the launch version of the careers (pre-Get to Work Patch) was a lot of fun to me. I didn't care that my sims might not be able to max a career on normal or short lifespan. I play on long or with aging off most of the time. I liked that the career levels gave you specific, custom challenges for leveling up instead of just the same generic "hit X level of X skill and have X many family friends" that TS2 had for every single job. I liked that I had to make my sim go out of their way to hit certain career milestones. I really enjoyed the challenge. But, because a few wimps just couldn't cope with even a mild amount of challenging game design, it was nerfed down to "hit X level in X skill," and the game is worse off for it. They didn't even give us difficulty modes. No, nerfed for everyone, even the people who were actually enjoying it. Thanks, filthy casuals...
