I concur with your points about traits. In fact, I'm not sure if anyone could disagree with them. It is strange how despite TS3 allowing your Sim to have more traits, TS3's traits also had more depth. You'd think there would've been a trade-off. Instead, they're just another (very easy) way to manipulate your Sim's emotions. But because the emotions themselves don't have any depth, traits suffer because of it. It's also hard to use traits as a way to add flaws to your Sim. Vampires did this the best with the Weakness system, but the drawback is that your Sim has to be a vampire to have weaknesses at all.
Comparing traits from TS3 and TS4 is something I've done for a while now myself. You can easily tell how much they affect their respective games by just looking at their wiki pages. TS3's pages for its traits have way more information than TS4's... because they do a lot more.
You raise an interesting point with the Inspired emotion. It's a rather exclusive one, by that I mean only creative Sims would really get any use out of it coupled with the fact that the only thing it does is boost your Sim's creativity in the arts when in reality, inspiration can help you with many things. You can be inspired to pull off a mean and clever prank on someone or accomplish some inspirational good or a creative way to impress your date. With that, I too wonder why it's even there when it's so one-dimensional in this game.
Somebody made the point that whims were meant to be optional, but I don't think that's the point of the OP's statement. In TS3, whims would correspond with what your Sim was doing as well as their traits and many of them were unique. This gave points towards interesting and unique rewards. TS4's lacks variety, purpose, and memorability.
Aspirations, I'm undecided on. I do agree they should be more interesting, but they're aspirations, not Lifetime Goals like in TS3. Perhaps this is semantical, but to me, a "lifetime goal" has more weight and requires far more time than an aspiration. I also see both points in how easy they are to switch. Making them easy to switch allows for more things for your Sim to do which could be appealing, gameplay-wise, especially if you're like me and have a very goal-oriented playstyle, but it damages the individuality of each Sim and in this game, Sims are absolutely lacking ways to make them unique from others apart from their appearance.
