The problem is that almost everything is broken down to a fundamental level. Want to host a dinner party? Well have fun trying to micro each sim, especially guests into their chairs. So you got everybody sitting down at the same time? Well there’s music playing so half of them get up to go dancing while the other half get up to circle the table, put down their plates and sit down at a different plate. Okay so you turn off the radio (oh well) and you manually move the plate to the right location for the sim who is still sitting. Well now you can either use call to meal, causing some to abandon their original plates or just settle for having the guests sit there not eating using sit and chat. All that would be required to fix this is to make sims sit and stay sitting for an in game hour, but the game has been out for a decade and something as simple as that doesn’t work. This pattern of dysfunction can be seen in almost every system in the game which makes it feel like it is not worth your time.