This "bug" caused by human mistake, but they choose to exclude instead of fixing them, I don't blame them, seem like most players don't care about skins, if player report this mistake, maybe got chance to be fixed by official patches or later expensions.

I'm pretty sure they excluded it because they officially shipped Hot Date with this mistake, without these NPCs, and later it didn't make sense to add them in, because people could complain about it changing their experience of Downtown.

But they still could have released it as fixed downloadable content. So that's really not an excuse. 🤷

Tip: instead of putting these skins in the GameData/Skins folder, it may make more sense to add the CMX files to them, and to put them as a FAR into the ExpansionPack3 (Hot Date) folder. I think that's where they were really meant to go. There you can put both skins and NPCs into a FAR file, and the game will load them (the same as it does for the expansion pack FARs).

Edit: But they need to be converted to BCFs! You can't have a CMX file in a FAR. That will crash the game! So maybe your approach is more practical. 🤔

I always tried to use minimal actions for those fixes, the NPC files and BMPs still can be readed even it located in FAR file in download folder, so I leave them totally untouched instead of moving them into ExpansionPack3 folder, only additional files are extracted skn and cmx files, I place them into Skins folder just easy for my manage, actually got many other ways, user can choose which ways more suitable for them.

I don't think ExpansionPack3 folder can read the NPC files since they are used for townies, all townie NPC files being placed in TemplateNPCs instead of their own ExpansionPack folders.

I also tried BabbagesHDTPatcher from SimEnhancer (it can be downloaded via Internet Archive Wayback Machine), the extracted skins go into ExpansionPack3/Skins, and the NPC files go into TemplateNPCs, end up you still need to seperate them into 2 folders if put them into ExpansionPack3 folder

Just dropping a link in for people who want to take a look:
https://web.archive.org/web/2012042...ad/Default.aspx
Original site still partially works too:
http://www.simenhancer.com/Download/Default.aspx

Upon installing and having a look at Livin' Large from the CD, I can confirm that @Stephanie is indeed right. Not only are the skins I posted featured in the retail Livin' Large installation, they are actually the final thing -- exactly the same as in the retail release. So this version of Edith already included all the player skins for the then up-coming Sims expansion-pack, Livin' Large.

And yes, most of these skins are definitely missing from the "Complete Edition" (which is not so complete after all).

Don't forget the most important skin of all absent from the supposedly Complete Collection: the lime green top and leopard pants outfit. The omission of which is a cultural travesty on the level of the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria