Yeah, I had typed that post out in wordpad lol.
But yeah, for me, most of the sims I've made have a save in my library/gallery, like: "Straudred 1"for example. I'm still on the road to creating another save since the ones with the teens who finished highschool were a bit bloated by various flavors of self created sims who I hadnt really touched. Figured some of those were the biggest problem and got rid of some.
My Yopson save, I did a save as and new savefile for that as well as deleted some of the older "not in this world" households that were cluttering, hopefully, I should be able to play him without hangs soon. All the saves with my first vampire seem to be good...
I should mention I have roughly 3 to 10 saves depending on the particular version of back up, but I'm back to using the original latest version of saves which had managed to bloat to nearly 1gb in size before I started trimming away at the excess.
For me, it just appears right now as if the issues were mainly centered around over population on the household management system, because I typically dont bother putting the "exiled" groups of offspring or other sims, in houses. Glad I was able to provide some help or suggestions of where to look for issues.
Excuse me, I want to make sure: Did your save file's size reach 1GB? (I mean one save file, not a save folder). Because mine is 21MB for save file that has under 700 sims. But I didn't keep "photo items" in inventory because they are real culprit for the bloating file's size.
Photos are picture files but sims and lots (without mods) data are text. So, the impact is very different.
Your playstyle probably needs to split household members into different save files to make sure that you can keep everything properly. If you have more details about your managing methods that you want to share, feel free to share, it's good for me to learn!
