I did not think open world was bad at all - the lag was mainly routing issues in Sims 3 that could be fixed. I fixed all my worlds in Sims 3 to eliminate that lag but it did take a lot of time and fixing especially if you moved a house or worse if you placed a lot - it often broke the routing so you had to know how to find the breaks in the routing and how to fix it. Especially seeing Maxis worlds could not be put in CAW so it was a lot harder to fix. You had to have CAW files to alter a world and Maxis did not share those files with the exception of the base game world. CAW was also not very user friendly so for most of us it was a big learning experience to learn to work with it and not create worse problems than we already had.
