To me, most of the game dynamic issues revolve around TINY city spaces. When you have no way to sprawl out your city it makes it tough to develop and change since one of your main focuses has to be about maximizing density within a tiny area.
This is what I don't get about the production of this game. From what I've read, this game is written for a single core, single threaded. There had to be SOMEBODY during the alpha phase that said "Hey, these city plots are tiny as heck, people aren't going to like that." And nobody felt the idea of trying to redirect development into utilizing hardware that most gamers have? Yes, I get it, its not that easy to write multicore/multithreaded games. But were they really that full of themselves they would believe players would be happy with a SimTown (or really this game was what Simsville from 10+ years ago was) instead of Simcity? Apparently so.
That's what so disappointing about this game. The concerns about city size were there before the game was ever released. One has to imagine other people within the development team raised this issue too. Yet in the end, decisions like that went long ways into making a crappy game (ontop of all the bugs and horrible server issues).
Maxis wants to whine how they can't make the city plots bigger, its because they made moronic decisions about the general coding of the game. Glassbox probably could be able to simulate large populations with multicores/multithreads, but nobody will know since that entire issue has been swept under the rug.
I really hope this series doesn't end up in the dustbin like Master of Orion or heck the Total War series is heading. So many classic series being ruined by shoddy development. It is downright sad what the industry has produced.