Morale is Rock Bottom? How do you feel about the state of the Sims

My morale is fine however because I just don't care, but the second part stands true.

I have a long loving relationship with ts4. It has my full support. It's loads of fun and I would love to see many more years of it. There is so much potential and so much stuff to add! And we need zoooommbbiieesss!! Performance is top noch on my PC and rarely do I get bugs. The few I encounter never stopped me from working around it and continuing on.
Even dine out that people complain about is fine for me. I'm genuinely confused about the complaints. I played it a few days ago when a friend offered my sims to go by invite to a star wars restaurant. The only thing I noticed is that one of the workers spawned with my sims standing outside. But he went in and started working. I got a table, ordered my food. Me and the friend chatted, we danced, the food came, we ate. My celebrity showed up with a lobster costume and started inciting cheers that was amusing ? he wouldn't give me a hug or a selfie so I sprayed him with stink spray.
Danced with my friend some more then went home. Everything was so smooth that I literally don't understand what the problem is.
Even my friend didn't run of like uncontrolled sims do as if you're not together when you go out with them. He did get up to dance for a bit because he has the dance trait but he came back to me right before the food came.

But anyway, I'm extremely satisfied with everything at this point ? if I didn't love it I wouldn't enage in sims content, I'd go do one of my other hobbies.

I think the only reason I still play is for the modding community. If mods werent an option for me, I'd be long gone.

The only reason I can play this broken mess of a game is thanks to the tireless efforts of the modding and CC community. I feel as though I'm fighting with the game constantly. I don't want situational outfits, I don't want random kids making messes in my park, I don't want smelly, ill pets wandering around town, I don't want them constantly dropping everything to wash their hands or drink because EA put hidden motives in the game and made them decay incredibly quickly.

I could keep going, but I won't.

I hate how easy it is to make my sims happy, I hate the focus on realism over the wacky urban fantasy of previous games, I hate how shallow all the packs feel.

At the moment the only ways EA could get back my faith is by releasing TSM2 or rereleasing TS3 but optimised for modern machines.

It is what it is.

I don't see things getting better. Have they? If there were not mods to 'fix' things and or to improve things how many of us would be playing the vanilla game waiting on the next patch to make it 'better'. ?

I think of life as being like a roller coaster with many ups and downs. Sometimes things don't go well, but most of the time if you wait a while the tide turns. I have a favorite restaurant and really enjoy the good food there. A few times I was disappointed in the quality of the meal, but I still go there because the majority of the time the food is really good! If I enjoy something I am going to continue with it and Sims games are no exception. I still enjoy the older games, bugs and all. Yes I get frustrated but I am right back playing again, because I enjoy it. I was disappointed with how the gameplay in My Wedding Stories wasn't working so I didn't buy it. But now fixes are coming in the next few weeks, so I am going to get it. I know once fixed I am really going to be able to enjoy my Sims' weddings!

It didn't used to be this low, but it's been in a perpetual downturn for the past 3 years at least. Post-Seasons but before RoM, I would've been just at 'meh' levels, I was still playing Sims 4 religiously (my game hours are a testament to that) but I didn't start to get real irked until MFP, which was insulting to me. Around the time before RoM though, I finally started getting into modded play because I was getting more unsatisfied with what the game and packs offered, but I was still a bit timid about full modded gaming. Post-RoM though, the state of the franchise became overbearing and the game bugs frustrated so much I actually took a small break for sometime, only playing occasionally but no longer believing I could play unmodded while still having fun. I also started getting a bit more invested in Sims 3 again.

I was notably absent up till about Snowy Escape, when I took a mild interest in Sims 4 again, but the whole Korean controversy and the bugs still unresolved along with the whole Star Wars debacle not too long after or before this, completely deterred me from Sims 4 entirely for a long while. I didn't even get a chance to even try the pack's gameplay before I decided, 'this isn't worth my time anymore' either. This was when I was starting to long for the gameplay of Sims 2 and even Medieval. The current situation around the world at the time didn't help either, but I simply found better things to play or do when Sims 4 used to fill that void.

Through that time, the Kits were revealed, and I was wholly reviled against them, but tried to get back into the game to finish what I left behind around last Thanksgiving 2021, but I only focused on updating my existing Sims and builds with the content I didn't have since then, and rarely played the actual game and even when I did, it was fully modded. By this year, over half of my mods folder are now bug fix mods, overhauls, and/or replacements and improvements to the game and its systems, and have become thoroughly repulsed with the state EA has let the Sims team become with the churning out of Kits that I still despise, the broken state of MWS upon release, and how EA itself wants to play politics blocking entire countries from accessing their products, that I've now started to turn much more favorably then I was to the franchise's promising competitors.

The number of bugs the latest game pack launched with is concerning, but I look forward to playing after work everyday, and I'm currently having a lot of fun with it. Mods help too.

2 years ago I had hope for this game and franchise, now... Not anymore. I see other games coming out, and the quality of graphics, visuals, the worlds, the depth of gameplay is insane in comparison. It's 2022, this should feel like a next gen game, but it doesn't. It feels cheap.

I look at other games and I'm amazed by how gorgeous the worlds look and how immersive they feel. In comparison I look at the town area in Tartosa, and nothing about that screams premium or next gen. I don't look at the boxy mysims looking unusable buildings and get excited by how premium it feels.

The only word I could use to describe this game at this point is cheap. And the price doesn't reflect that. It's just consistent overpriced content, gameplay that's lacking and shallow (on the rare occasions it works) and visuals which look more like a mobile game than a next-gen game.