Whew! Twinbrook! I hope you have better luck in that town than I did with the swamps and all the lag! One thing that helped was using NRaas>register>animal control>set all to zero, as that stopped all the wild animals and strays from trying to route through the swamps. But I'm currently wanting to start another game in Twinbrook, so I'm checking at the Nraas site to see if they have anything else that might help with lag. I'm seriously considering moving the families and deleting the homes from that area to see if that will help even more.
Oh, as far as Story Progression pairing up your sims too fast, I've recently been playing with the partner liking gate setting, and since I've increased it to 55 instead of 40, it does seem to have slowed things down a bit.
And if you really want to be able to choose specific partners for your sim, NRaas SP Relationship does have an 'arranged marriage' feature, though I haven't tried it yet.
But...I ended up turning 'allow break up' to false as it seemed to break couples up faster than it was partnering them!
And I set some of the other parameters very low or turned them off also, like red haired baby---um, no!
It really helped to try it out in a test game before playing in one of challenge games, so I knew which features I didn't like or needed to tweak.
As far as Cathleen and Blaise----whoop!!! Nice to see her back in your game!
