Tbh, I honestly prefer either maxis match or something in between maxis and alpha. I honestly just tend to use slightly higher graphic settings, additional skin tones, and some default replacements that smooth out the maxis style features a bit without completely changing it (luumia, betterbody, etc.). I fooled around with alpha, but at the end of the day, while I love me some create-a-sim, I use a ridiculous amount of gameplay mods and that's more what I'm focused on (my mods folder is clunky enough as is). Having Alpha-style sims interact with maxis NPCs just looks weird and I don't have the patience to adjust every NPC that the game decides to generate for the purpose of aesthetic. I have a few simple skin overlays that I may use for a particular sim, but I only really bother with cc that doesn't look too out of place among maxis style sims.
Biggest thing that bugged me about alpha cc is that it looks weird with the games animations, at least to me, alpha features don't look quite right when animated...