Combatting the "Jeffty is Five" Effect

One of the strangest things (and trust me, there are many, many strange things) about Sims2 is how aging is implemented. Our playables go through all age stages, with the YA stage being optional. Ignoring for a moment the insanity that is how University is handled, this means that a sim is on their pixellated Earth for approximately 70 days in an unmodified game, not counting University.

But what about townies and (if applicable) downtownies? These sims are not consciously played until they are added into a family, but they still are a very large part of the game. Yet they seem to be stuck in some sort of temporal stasis, ala "Jeffty is Five". A child may bring home from school a fellow student who also was best friends with his great-great-great-great grandmother. How strange!

I've constantly struggled with how to handle townies. Do I explain their inability to age away as their being part of a temporal stasis? Do I say that as the Oversoul has not yet gained interest in them, they are not yet entire beings, and the good and the bad of being a fully conscience sim is that one will grow, reproduce, and die? Do I eventually lose my mind and kill them all off? Do I age them along with my sims? If so, should I just start counting down the days until my neighborhood blows up in the famous BFBFVS, those hundreds of character files and memory files from dead townies eventually causing complete meltdown?

My solution for the moment is to age townies up on a rotation. This still isn't near realistic, but it's something, and it means that that adorable little townie kid I'd love to marry into my family, or a rather quirky teen who really needs some more spotlight, might eventually grow and join the family, or age and die to build fodder for my graveyards and make way for more townies. Each time the eldest of a generation ages to teen, I age half of the children, teens and elders, and a fourth of the adults. This isn't done randomly. I have a spreadsheet letting me know what lifestage every townie is in, when they last aged up, and what round I'm in. Before doing so, I check SimPE to see if any new townies have generated so they aren't missed. It's a lot of maintenance. It's still not quite what I want. It's going to add eight or so dead character files every generation. But it's enough that Jeffty eventually will grow old, even if his best friend has long passed.