I was tempted once to grab them all during a sale, it would have been $40 down from like $160 or something, but I also don't want to get sucked into a game like that. Games like civ and simcity eat too much time i've been down those rabbit holes before. Even as it is I spent literally two days straight doing nothing but playing this game when I started that map.
With the early game it wasn't so bad, like one or two districts, but as the city grew, it became too much, hence the residential surrounding industrial stuff.
Most of the dystopian stuff came from my frustration with limitations in the game. The massive amounts of roads and bridges came from the traffic congestion problems and my lack of patience in rebuilding roads or designing transit lines, though i do have 3 massive metro lines that crisscross the city.
The interesting thing to me was the disparity in my city and the dystopianness came from my negligence and lack of patience or caring. The ghettos and ramshackle neighbourhoods built themselves around the zones i built out of just the hell of it much of the time. A lot of it came from stuff the game just generated. Zooming into the close up view in some areas was kinda heart breaking.
It mostly showed me how intentional negligence leads to some of the most nightmarish outcomes and that the games modelling of neighbourhoods based on zoning and surroundings is scarily accurate.
As for mods, really the move it and traffic manager president edition is basically a minimum to not be frustrated.