I seems most likely to me that they just didn't realise the consequences of how they had set it up. The game was written by multiple programmers. The likelihood is the one who wrote the deleting routines was not the one who wrote the routines to reuse SWAF instances and so on.

And, to carry on from what maxon said, I highly doubt they play-tested far enough to see any of the consequences of stuff like deleting from the sim-bin, putting an occupied lot in to the lots bin and transferring to a different 'hood, using deleteallcharacters etc. Things like this (and also the alien eye bug where a sim doesn't get alien eyes if they have a non-alien skin) become obvious after a couple of generations of gameplay, but not if you're testing off a checklist.

Yeah but would they have any reason to have it on the checklist in the first place? It seems to me they probably just didn't think about it. Shame no attempt was made to fix it in a patch though. I wonder if they thought, 'oh well, no-one's going to play a neighbourhood long enough for this to be important anyway.' If you only play short-lived neighbourhoods, the corruption usually doesn't matter because the neighbourhood stops being used before the problems become overwhelming. Long-term neighbourhood players like me have to be really careful. Fortunately for me, Little Carping is still working well - but I manage it very carefully.

Simply, my habit of deleting EVERYTHING that has survived on my game past 3 weeks. Aka I just deleted my Sunshine family for no reason. ;A; All my hard work; gone!

I'm one of those horrible people who likes a "fresh start" constantly. OTL

Oh, wow, there have been lots of really stupid things.

1. In Sims 1, I didn't know about fire alarms. I made a husband and wife, she was cooking and got killed by fire. I was frantic and didn't know how to put out the fire! My Sim that survived wouldn't get a job, wouldn't eat, all he did was cry. I also had the Clown picture in his house and didn't know about that either.

The Clown was always coming and he would cry more and he didn't have any money so I couldn't buy him nice stuff to help him, get his mood up so he would get a job, had to keep selling stuff in his house so he could at least eat a liquid meal. I didn't know any cheats. I finally got it worked out and played that one Sim for the life of "The Sims" series.

2. In Sims2 I didn't really know much about the Energizer. My fav Sim was slightly in gold aspiration when I had him use it for the umteenth time, in fast speed. He died when he all of a sudden fell into the green Aspiration. I freaked out! I had to figure out how to hurry up and quit and not save to get him back.

3. Files: I had a fav band I made to make Sim videos, but when I created the Custom Hood they lived in, I had already deleted one of the Maxis hoods in Menu I didn't want to play. So, the game named my Custom Hood the Number of the Maxis hood I had deleted. I didn't know the game would do this, then. So, when I removed the Sims 2 File and tried putting back in my saved Sims2 file (don't remember why I was starting over) it got erased. I searched and searched hundreds of backups of my pc for that hood. I thought it would be named Hood Number 3...but I didn't realize it was named Number 2....I thought they were gone for good until one day I lucked up and found my fav. custom hood (number 2) on an old dvd backup of my hood. That was months later.