I have a real hard time understanding how people can say "the features don't matter".
This is The Sims. Half the gameplay is about the customisation and options. Removing these features means that the gameplay ultimately suffers. This isn't like Halo where taking a big rock out of a map isn't going to do much, since players never had to interact with the decor in the game (except as cover). This is actively limiting your players from more than half of what the expected gameplay should be.
Doesn't matter if you use or don't use those features. You have to agree that a AAA studio should know better than to limit overall gameplay for the sake of either blatant money-making or time constraints. It's not like they've never made a Sims game either; they already know all the features people love, so there should be the expectation that those features make it into the basegame, and that the expansions offer brand-new content that they've never thought of before.
Also, people saying these features weren't in Sims 2/3 basegame, I had both on release, and many of these were present, so no idea what crack people are smoking these days.
Why do people feel like they have a responsibility to defend a company when it's clear they're acting real shifty/stuffty?
