Fun fact: You could select Hair Color, Fat&Skinny and many other things as preferences in TS2 but you couldn't choose skin ton, despite that also being a limited choice when creating your Sims, not a pallete. Most likely to avoid the "being unatracted by black people" :^)
I believe Woohooer from NRAA or Awesome mod tries to solve that problem by implementing some different metrics, like having high skills or a lot of cash make you atractive. The problem is that so far, having a single skill at 3 or 4 is enough to trigger atraction. You go to the University and you come out a Casanova.
This is more related to the lack of real preferences by Sims though. You'd expect Frugal and Evil Sims to be more atracted to cash, but no! Everyone likes cash the same…
The thing about The Sims is that it's a fantasy fullfillment game. Most people self insert themselves or create a scenario that they want to play out in a specific way. And the game obliges by not throwing too many obstacles in your way. TS4 is all about giving you tools to build those scenarios, actually. Pretty much no real obstacle there.
So basically, the kind of people that wants a serious life simulation where you have to adapt to the world as much as it adapts to you, simply aren't the target audience.
For starters, consider that there's no long term AI planning. Left to their own, a Sims satisfies his needs first and then interacts with objects\people according to their traits. But he will never make long term decisions like practicing a skill for a promotion. If a Sims plays Chess it's because you gave him the Genius trait, not because he wants to gain Logic for any goal at all. They won't compete, won't try to get promoted and won't even choose a line of work they like, it's purely random.
You have a single Corporation building for the Business Career. You could place another, but why? There would be no competition between both with jobs and salaries rising and failing as their sucess (influenced by the employees work) changes. A CEO is exactly the same as the lowest employee in terms of mechanics, he just gets more cash for less money. It never affects any part of the economy or generate actual interesting stories on it's own.
You have Vampires in the world. But they don't befriend people for the sake of securing blood banks, they don't make allies to defend their hunting grounds or fight against other vampires to keep them out. There's even no real competition over said hunting grounds and the concept of them being dangerous creatures isn't even a serious thing in the game.
Basically, we'd need a completely different game than what The Sims gives us, focused on a lot of different things.