To all the world builders, are you as unhappy as family players?

CAW is a nice thing, I enjoyed using it, mostly because I love breathtaking landscapes, forests and such, and pre-made worlds were severely lacking plants as far as I’m concerned ;) I definitely prefer something more dense.


I’m not sure if I’d use CAW in TS4 for the same purpose, because everything looks too plastic to make me enjoy landscaping, but I’d surely like the possibility of creating my own worlds and downloading ones created by other players. I don’t want to be limited to EA worlds, especially given that there aren’t many of them in the game and I’ve seen people complaining about running out of space (it hasn’t happen for me because I don’t really play TS4, I gave it two tries, I’ll probably give it some more, but I can’t imagine myself playing it as much as older iterations, it’s just not a game for me). A CAW tool would solve that problem.
One of my biggest disappointments in the game is the lack of in-game world editing. I’d like to put more and/or different size lots, definitely more plants, decorations, and I’d rebuild those barbecue areas.

As for build mode, I don’t like it. Sure, it does have some nice features like different wall heights, but it’s too restricted and full of inconveniences. I miss CASt, I really liked transforming useless furniture/wallpaper/whatever to something nice and stylish, I liked infinite possibilities of customising my buildings, I liked being able to match everything I wanted... In TS4 if something matches with respect to colour it doesn’t with respect to style and the other way around, it’s pretty annoying and I’m not really tempted to download a huge amount of recolours.
One of the aforementioned inconveniences is how using the shift key while painting walls works – it was very convenient and logical in older games, but in TS4 it’s pretty messy really, and I’m basically forced to avoid it in most cases, to not let it mess anything up. It shouldn’t depend on what the game treats as a room, it should depend on already placed wall coverings like it used to in the past. And why on earth can’t I use those wall coverings with vertical stripes like I want instead of being restricted to corners? They don’t even work properly when I have a fancily shaped building.
I like the trim/cornice tool (I don’t remember its proper name, I hope it’s obvious what I mean), but then again, it’s pretty inconvenient – why can’t I draw it like a wall or a fence? It’s the same as those wall coverings, using the cornices on a fancily shaped building is extremely tedious; it was supposed to be easy but it definitely isn’t.
And don’t even get me started on terrain tools... Why can’t I build a house on a hill, add a pond, and a nice bridge using constrainfloorelevation false? TS4 really is terrible with respect to customisation options, especially compared to TS3. It’s sad, because I believe customisation is one of the reasons that made The Sims so popular – everyone can adjust various aspects of the game to their liking/taste.