Melkor

Some healthy competition may breathe some new life into the genre. From the graphics standpoint it certainly looks better than SC:S. It's too soon to decide which will be better overall at this point.

Well that just opens the playing field for someone else to step in and take a shot at making a good urban sim. Maybe with some fresh ideas.

While I agree that this is nothing like the classic Sim City style. I think it has the potential to be a good game. The whole social engineering aspect is actually somewhat interesting. I just wish they would have called it SimSociety or something and marketed it for what it is. I think it's pretty much impossible for them to change direction at this point. They're too far along in development to go back to the drawing board. The best we can hope for is that they realize it's not a true sequel and treat it as such. Let it be a good game in it's own right.

I've been experimenting with different grid configurations as well, used to just use 3x3 blocks of 3x3 (grid within a grid sorta thing) for each "neighborhood". The traffic gets horrendous with that many intersections though so I've been working with larger block sizes. I have to agree that as far as aesthetics goes, it's all in the eye of the beholder. (I'll search for more info though)