I agree with you on that one! It always seems fun until you don't NEED to scrambled to get money, or you don't have to just read a book to make your Sim happy, you can now use something that doesn't take the long Sim hours to do, you have the robots and the simpler things which make it seem much easier and it loses it's edge, which is why I only play a family for a certain amount of time before their fun and interesting story becomes a typical rich-family story. No matter what you do, if you start out playing with a Sim and create a family they will eventually end up rich, and I haven't found a way around that yet, to like, almost lock their money up in a bank or something so they start back at 10000 and they can't get to their money, maybe they need to create the National Sim Bank, so when you get TOO much money you can put it away for a long time and come back for it if your Sims (somehow) ever need it, but it would reset your money down to however much is left after you "deposited" it in the bank.
Just a thought, anyways, I must say I am rooting for Tom! For some reason I've always felt bad for Tom in the series, he never stands a chance against Jerry! I sure hope he can win this one! He deserves it after all his hard work.