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As a contrary opinion, I like premades, and a lot of my recent gameplay has been taking over a premade household. Many of them have good backstories to start with. My current favorite game is the Riffin household, which is a newly aged-up YA looking after his two younger siblings after their parents die in a fire (with gravestones on the lot).
I'm very invested in having a fleshed out town, and EA Story Progression just doesn't do jack with inactives. I use NRaas StoryProgression, though not all the modules, and I set the speed on Slow. Even running normal lifespan, I think NRaas's normal speed is much too fast. Half the town will be married before you have a chance to start your active sim dating. If you use some of the Personalities modules, you can introduce some more complicated interpersonal relationships amongst inactives, though I'd set the speed of those to slow AT LEAST and maybe ultra-slow (or whatever the snail pace is called). When I ran with the supernatural personalities, inactives were changing supernatural type (recruited, then cured, etc) incredibly fast.
I think all sims should have their first point of Charisma as fast as possible because it's just impossible to maintain relationships outside the household without it, though it occurs to me that there might be a mod to increase the default relationship gain for someone without Charisma. When you have relationships outside the household, however, they will call and invite you to parties. This is somewhat bugged, but I've found that inactive parties work if you go to the inactive sim's house as soon as you get the invitation as opposed to when the party actually starts. You also get a pretty absurd number of calls for dates. That can be helped by deleting your online dating profile, which I believe every adult sim has by default. My sims without profiles get some dating calls, but fewer and from people they actually know.
I've found that keeping my household connected with relationships outside the household works better with a somewhat longer lifespan by default. It gives you a more natural amount of time to visit and interact with these inactive sims.
I also run with Jobs Overhaul and Twinsimming's Layoff mod, plus a few other mods to make progression not so automatic. I'm not sure if you consider those to be grindy. The Riffins started out dirt poor, and it's been difficult for them to get ahead, which is exactly the challenge I'm going for.
Some wishes are good for character development and some aren't. I find the relationship wishes are pretty good (e.g. hang out with, chat with, ask on date, kiss, move in with, etc.). The early wishes to develop skills are pretty annoying because they're so predictable, so I ignore them. Also, TS3's wishes are truly miserable to mod, so there are very few mods that add gameplay that include wishes. You have to use some other way to decide your sim will pursue those activities.
It's a pretty open-ended question, so one could write forever about how to make the game interesting.
Echo Weaver's Simblr:
http://echoweaver.tumblr.com/
A portrait in stubbornness - Playing the same legacy since 2009
Sample a Brave Legacy:
http://sims3sample.illation.net