Sims 4 and Stability Questions

Can't say I've played Sims 4 before but have a bit of experience with Sims 3. My main issues with that game were the loading times and how simulating everything at once caused a lot of stability issues and how the game would start to bloat and chug the more you played it. Honestly I never did much with the town side of things so there was a lot of things slowing down my PC for no real reason. As such I'm looking into the Sims 4 but have a few questions to see if it'll be for me.

• To my knowledge, Sims 4 doesn't simulate the whole town at once and that switching to anything outside of your house goes through a loading screen. Are these loading screen bearable or am I likely to find myself finding excuses to never leave the house?

• How bad is the loading and loading screen situation? Does the game keep itself relatively bloat-free? I know there is always going to be something, but I really got the impression with Sims 3 that as time went on it suffered from bloat and that things could have been a bit better with good optimization.

• With the current expansion packs, does any part of the game feel missing? Content you might expect but which EA might be saving to milk our wallets add to an exciting new expansion pack?

• On a similar vein, is there enough of a variety in the content. In sims 3 I loved that by the end of of the expansion packs you had plenty of options - in addition to a very varied everyday life you could go down the high-tech route with aliens, invention, and into the future but also have a very mystical side of things available with Supernatural as well as potions from invention and some store content. It would be nice if there are similar amounts of varied content in 4.

• Is there a storefront similar to the sims 3 store with custom content and available downloads? I did enjoy a lot of the extra maps and furnishings from the old Sims 3 store.

• Are there any mods which you fine folks would recommend to install immediately because they make the vanilla experience that much better? Similarly, Is there anything I should know if I were to get the game? Like bugfixes or unintuitive tips.