There are work-arounds to make the gameplay faster (even if the issues themselves are not corrected.)
For example, you can purchase multple fridges, sinks, coffee makers, toilets, etc. and get up to ten sims in a house and spend a few minutes doing the least time consuming action for each trait (ie. "Use toilet - 5 seconds" to fill up your Bladder trait) Then you can cycle through all of your sims for all items until they are inspired.
Alternately, you can purchase a Singing Salmon from the Decorations tab and have them sing and dance to the salmon for 30 seconds and have them be inspired across the board in all traits.
Yes, this work-around does not address the underlying issues of time-costs versus payout in some of the actions, but it gets what you need done in the end. There are a lot of actions that do not always make sense, where a sim can do an activity that takes 2 hours and gives a ton of XP back or another activity that takes 5 hours and gives you less XP. Sometimes it is because items were released at different times within the game (I think) and other times it is just ....there. Special activities, like the picnic basket in the Outdoors area, doesn't always give out more XP or Simoleons than other easy-to-access activities, but it makes the gameplay more fun and more diverse.
Enjoy the animations for the longer, bad time-cost-good-reward activities when you have a chance and then use the short-cut methods if you are in a time crunch.
