I LOVE the Sims series!
I get so addicted, and spend hours creating and playing with them. (The house-building is the dullest aspect for me, though. I just make one big house with everything on one floor or maybe two floors, with barely any walls separating the rooms, lol.)
I preferred the Sims 2 (with expansions) over Sims 3 (with expansions), even though the Sims 3 has open neighborhods and better supernatural aspects.
The Sims 2 and expansions feel way more complete and less buggy (for the most part) and the neighborhoods were way more lively than the ghost towns of Sims 3 (even if the houses are "closed" and require loading screens).
I'm wary of Sims 4, though. I'm not pre-ordering this upcoming one this time. I will wait and see how EA will treat other customers' bug reports. Because the Sims 3 situation was terrible for some people:
The Sims 3 and expansions were very, very buggy and crashed a lot due to poor optimization, poor AI pathfinding, and poor AI functions such as when every Sim keeps their cars in their inventories, etc. I had to constantly use cheat codes and fan-made mods in order to make the game work smoothly.
I also didn't like how EA put some stuff on the online EA store and overprice them. I mean, some of the store stuff don't even work properly!
For example, the "Bakery" set? I had to get a fan-made mod and then do some awkward work arounds (ex:building half-walls behind display sets so Sims don't go behind these displays) in order to make it function properly like how a bakery is supposed to work!
And then there are the lack of Sims visiting each other. The parks are always empty, and the Sims take the longest paths just to get to the nearest grocery store (and sometimes get stuck), heh.
I shouldn't have to use the teleportation cheat every time my police Sims comes from work and get stuck in the same glitchy, broken spots over and over, lol!
(If I didn't use the cheat the Sim would never get anywhere and would starve to death on that spot.)
On the forums, you would hear lots of complaints, but the company doesn't seem to care (or blame the customer's computers) and just move on to the new product (which introduces new bugs).
So, no, I don't trust EA to make a complete product nowadays. I have spent too much money on their endless buggy expansion packs. I shouldn't have to rely on tons of fan-made solutions to fix a lot of the game.
I'm sticking to my Sims 2 and Sims 3 packs that I have, and, after I upgrade my computer, wait a few years to see how things go for Sims 4.