I have returned from cooking dinner to joyous news. Sort of. But at least I'm not losing my mind missing some factor after 6 hours of troubleshooting my game. Time for celebratory pizza.
Viewing post in Premade Sim and Relationship Overhaul comments
Whatever's going on is very weird and I'm having trouble diagnosing, but a fix is inbound and should be live this weekend.
Thank you for letting me know about this - whatever's happening seems to be impacting the versions packaged for download and not my personal copy, so I wouldn't have found out otherwise.