Now about your comment: You can’t deny that emotions are a new thing! By your logic, we could also call every single moodlet in Sims 3 a emotion. Sims never actually changed their behaviour because of emotions. Sure, there were a few idles thrown into there that mad them cry and sob when something bad happened, but you could still let them have an orgy seconds after their mother died. This time the emotions are supposed to effect your gameplay. Every emotion will change the way you have to handle your Sims, but also the way they behave and they gain benefits even from bad emotions. Something like that, emotions that really matter inside the game has never been there!
Memories and interaction with their neighboors were never called a new thing. Thay said that memories would work a lot better than in Sims 3 and that Interaction between your Sims and their neighboors will be a lot smoother and more believable than ever before. They didn’t call those things new!
Now, genetics are obviously nothing new. Even Sims 1 had genetics, if you count in the fact that children would never have a skin tone that isn’t shared with at least one of their parents. I think, what they are talking about here, is not the fact that genetics exist, but how they work. Both in Sims 2 and 3, children would inherit the facial features of their parents at random. Now with them talking about DNA, it sounds like the features of the parents will actually be combined into new features that resemble them, but are not identical to them. And if I understood that correctly, then yes, that is new!

Basically, just wait! We’ll never know how the game is going to turn out, no matter how much information we get. But as soon as it’s released, there will be a lot of gameplay by people like you and me. Then you will be able to form your opinion about the game.
As for the romour: The Sims 2 and it’s whole data was lost during development. They rebuilt the whole game in a very short amount of time. Even if these romours were true, it’s 90% of those exact same people working on Sims 4 that rescued Sims 2 and made it awesome. So, I’m not going to worry myself with things like that.

it’s annoying to me when they pass off stuff that’s always there as new and exciting.

It really seems as if this was an online MP game and they scrapped it last minute and started working with what they had. The gameplay needs to be like Sims 2 on steroids because we’re loosing a lot to gain what should have been there the whole time. :/

I just keep thinking of that “mis managed” rumour. It really sounds true. And I hate that SimGuruGrahams simself always looks discouraged and sad. Makes me feel that’s how he’s feeling right now trying to get 4 ready.