Ah, this is a nice topic. Learning other members' gameplay is an interesting way to get new and refreshing ideas of your own. But to answer you question: Well, I consider myself to be a mixture between Repo and Pam, but with a few changes. From the beginning I have played with just one family: Duit. Mother, father, sun, daugher, and eventually grandmother- and father form the whole family for a moment. Once a new generation get born, the grannies pass away and the mother and father take over their places. That is how I compare my gameplay to Pam's.
But then I change to play it more like if it was a World of Warcraft kind of thing: I specialize my sims in their personal purposes. First I need them to like each other, just because I don't want **ery in my game; then they need to fulfill their lifetime wishes and besides that they all have a certain goal in life that is an all around happiness for the whole family: a moneymaker, one food producer, technical person, a seeker, and someone that is needed to improve their environment, by for example: painting masterpieces, cutting gems or putting a scientific experiment on objects at the top of the science career, to give them an extra mood boost for sims walking by (which is by the way excellent to make toddlers happy and provide them with lifetime happiness points in their prill life: surround them with upgraded gnomes).
This is how I handle such a big family without getting crazy myself: I just start with the game in Pause. I give everyone their things to do and the last task is always 'Call Service.' Not to order pizza or giving the police station a crank call, but just to let myself know that someone needs attention when the screen pops up the moment I am somewhere else at the moment. Than I pause again and give that particular person some new orders. That way I can focus on that one sim that I want to follow, whilst the rest is either painting, writing, cutting out gems, socializing, making nectar, etc, etc. So, that's how I play.
By the way, here are some tips for easy (but expensive) room improvement which will improve the gameplay for gamers that play it like me or Repo:
Just hang over one big masterpiece painting per room, with two heartform cutgems being opal, pink diamond, soulpeace or rainbow colored one. That's enough for the 40 bonus decoration moodlet, just one painting and two gems. Then a fireplace and an upgraded stereo (an expensive one of course) will do the rest for you. Also try to provide some dinner chairs or other furniture with scientific experiments to get some weird moodlets like new car smell but save first before you try. I have lost a very precious 5 Star Chef Fridge after my sims sent it to another dimension or so by a science project going completely wrong and I deeply hope that you guys won't experience the same thing. Now it will be no trouble at all for your sims to be happy. No, it will be a challenge to not make them be.
[Edited for vocabulary and grammar. - Swede]
