Most of my qualms with Skylines are sort of "nitpicking", but they are pretty glaring:
1) the annoying tweet bird with no option to disable (at
last check) because the devs felt it was central to their
design
2) terrible UI graphics (I know this is subjective,
but...) seriously; the UI graphics are not very
polished compared to SimCity 2000 or SimCity 3 even
and look like they were made by a programmer
3) funky road placement; the road placement tools have a
lot of the same "floaty" feeling that SimCity "5" did that
has lead to much frustration (see the skylines subreddit
for various complaints about this)
With that said, they did get a lot of things "right" as far as I can tell, such as traffic simulation, map size, and general performance (mostly thanks to Unity really....) and their friendliness to mods, no extra drm, etc.
One thing that's great is the community (and Colossal/Paradox attitude towards people that mod the game). The game is pretty new and there is already tons of different mods, it'll be interesting to watch how this evolves over time. So, you say that you don't like Chirpy - you may be interested in this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=40579... (fun name, isn't it?). AFAIK, there are already multiple communities that build mods, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylinesModding
I enjoyed the Rush Hour expansion more than the original SC4. One thing that SC4 did extremely well though was music and general presentation, although I'll admit to missing much of the original composer's music for SimCity 3000/2000.
SimCity 2000 had a lot of great mechanics but a fairly terrible interface -- somewhat understandable given its original incarnation as a dos game and certain UI mechanics hadn't come along yet (such as being able to use the scroll wheel or panning around).
But I'll always fondly remember when I upgraded to a SoundBlaster AWE32 just so I could get "real midi" music from SimCity 2000 :-)
As good as Skylines is, the game isn't quite Maxis caliber. SimCity (2013) had incredible UI and UX design. It's just a shame that it was marred by tiny city sizes, overemphasis on simplicity, and online services dependency.
That said, Colossal Order's budget probably wasn't Maxis-caliber either, so I'm hoping the revenue from Skylines will allow them to be more ambitious moving forward, and make something truly outstanding (as opposed to merely awesome).
In addition, mods aren't a great option since doing so marks you as a "cheater" or disables achievements, etc.
I generally agree with your conclusions about SimCity (2013) though; generally great UI, but tiny city sizes, online services dependency (which is greatly mitigated now as of the "final" patch), and some of the "streamlining" done to the game.
That said, the value that a robust modification ecosystem can add to a game cannot be understated. Skyrim is a fantastic example of this.
Except for the Linux version which barely goes above 30 fps even on monster GPUs. Thanks Unity :(
When the two can go hand-in-hand great, but I'll pick fun over accuracy every time for a game.
Now with that said, if your purpose is to build an accurate simulation -- go for it! But SimCity has always been a game first and foremost to me with a quasi-interesting simulation.
Which of course utterly fails to capture any of the detail of an electrical grid.
Another semi-related thing, I'm curious if/when we'll live in a time when every decision is run on some world simulation before being "implemented". Does anybody know how often/if Expert Systems[2] are used in politics/business? How would you approach designing such "simulation", what would be the hardest problems?
[0] http://www.citiesskylines.com/
[1] Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJb7C2OE9xM
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system