I guess it's just how I play the game. I personally wouldn't just buy eggs from the store, I mean even when I was doing the quests, if I didn't have what they wanted, I would do what I had to do to get the ingredients/skills needed to complete it.
When I have my completionist, Blaire play this pack, I will obviously get a perfect variety of all the plants, unlock and display all cross-stitching patterns at the highest quality with the wool from her llamas she sheered herself, have every type of chicken, unlock all the treats, and make sure that she has everything she needs to be able to produce all of those things on her own without the store. I'm honestly not much into story, I'm truly more of a strategic player. I just have this thing of self-sufficiency that runs really deep that drives my sims playing. I refuse to rely on a store, and the biggest drawback to me with this pack is the flour and sugar can't be produced. I was really hoping cricket meal or something could be a flour substitute, but I'll just save any flour/sugar obtained in quests in family inventory for cakes.
I know the fair keeps getting mentioned, and I have avoided that topic mainly because I don't really find it interesting. It'll probably just get used to complete the aspiration for me.
I didn't know about the candy jar, but I watched a video about the things you could get from the specters. First of all, I tried playing that pack, and it is bugged out, well the career is anyway. I love cooking and collecting recipes so much in the sims, I wouldn't use that personally. Also, even though the energized emotion keeps your sims up longer, I have this other thing in the way I play that I just don't like to play without needs. I mean I even avoided getting any type of hunger, hygiene, or energy reward trait because of this. I really like a routine for my sims, so anything that disrupts that is no go for me. I only use energized if they are leveling fitness or something. The most interesting thing in that pack to me is the specter jars because I really do not like that emotionally mindful buff, and it helps get it to the next level so you can surge an emotion. However, I haven't checked to see if this is fixed, but my "completionist" sim is a spellcaster and for some reason, the jobs won't complete when you have a spellcaster, so no specter jar for me. I'll check if it's fixed if I ever have a desire to play that pack again.
Snowy escape was the most disappointing pack for me. If I could get my $20 back, I would. When I bought it, the most exciting thing to me in that pack seemed to be the rock climbing excursion. For months, it was bugged. Onsen bathhouse was bugged and would come up as a generic lot whenever you tried to start the event. There was hundreds of reports of this on the forums, and it was literally game breaking imo. Finally it was fixed, but only for new saves with this last patch. So I excitedly got to move my "completionist" sim into a new file so she could finally complete that aspiration, and wow was that the most disappointing experience I ever had in the sims. I mean, I waited for months, avoided spoilers, for that?
Again, it's just really interesting to me what drives different simmers. Like in myself and heartfoam's case, it seems to be complete opposite things. I would never go out of my way to get that candy jar or do that disappointing mountain excursion. I would definitely go out of my way to make sure my sims was 100% self sufficient though.
On another note though, I really need to stop commenting on this thread, sorry to everyone who had to read my long rambling posts.