Things I like so far:

You can skill up anywhere.. use the library's computer, etc.

You can read your neighbor's books and harvest your neighbor's gardens. Cool way to get veggies/seeds when you're just starting out and are broke.

Digging through people's garbage. Funny as hell, and you can find cool stuff like garbage and moon rocks and old apples. Yum!

The police career is funny. Part of increasing job performance involves questioning people and then writing up reports. My sim invites people over and interrogates them. I have all the klepto babysitters on record down at the precinct.

I haven't lost a kid's homework yet. They seem to keep it in their inventory when they're not working on it.

Things that are meh:

Babies and toddlers. Still annoying. Toddler period lasts six freakin days, ugh.

I'm not sure I like the whole neighbors rapidly aging thing. I switched out of my first Sim's life because her two sets of twins (2 babies, 2 toddlers) were driving me freaking nuts. Made a new single young adult, moved in next door. During the course of the new sim's young adulthood, the neighbor kids have all grown to adult or teen, the parents keeled over and it seems like half the neighborhood is now dying of old age. Kind of hard to get to know anyone before they surpass you.

Either I sock** (quite likely) or it takes too much time to either work or have a family and also get to do the fun stuff like explore and do opportunities.  Maybe I need to tweak lifespans or somethin.

** sock is actually slang for "why censor a silly thing that starts with S and rhymes with duck?"