More Awesome Than You!

EDIT: As usual, I think I found the answer right after giving up and asking.  I suspect it's related to the game choking on the file limit.

Short version: Mac Super Collection deleting character files all over (and not in a clean way).  What the eff is doing this?  Theories?  Happened to anyone else?

More importantly, how can I keep it from happening again?  

(The Mac Super collection only includes EPs through BV, plus the Holiday, Family Fun and Glamour Life Stuff packs)

Long version:

Got the Mac SC version of TS2 about a week ago.  Playing in a cleaned (not empty) version of Pleasantview.

A few days ago the game crashed to desktop while loading the neighborhood.  When I restarted, I found that an infant had disappeared from the house I was playing.  It was not summonable by any means and the family's memories of infant were screwed up - her name was gone and replaced with "$Subject".  

Figured something had gone horribly wrong.  Wiped that neighborhood and restarted, this time careful to have *empty* templates of the stealth 'hoods / Downtown, etc installed so the families from later EPs weren't in my Sim Bin and I wouldn't accidentally add a bunch of Downtownies somehow.  

Started playing Pleasantview again.  Today I had another crash during loading the neighborhood.  Restarted and found EVERYONE had disappeared except Alexander Goth (and his bagful of corrupt memories).  Previously occupied houses were all vacant.  Checked the Characters folder and sure enough, there's only one file in there (N001_User00000.package).  

I had a lot of TS2 bugs back in the day, but this is the nastiest, and the one I've done the least to warrant (I barely played!).   :'(

Macs have a limit on how many file handles they can have open at a time. This limit is very low and easily reached in large, CC-infested neighborhoods, which will cause the game to be unable to finish loading or saving your game, as it cannot open the files.

I don't actually own a Mac, but here's some quick information I found:

http://superuser.com/questions/302754/increase-the-maximum-number-of-open-file-descriptors-in-snow-leopard
http://blog.mact.me/2014/10/22/yosemite-upgrade-changes-open-file-limit

Thank you for that second link, I had figured out the problem was the file limit, but had not been able to find a way to permanently adjust the limit in Yosemite.  Felt pretty foolish once I realized it was this old issue -- I somehow never ran into it back in the day, when think I had much bigger neighborhoods and more downloaded junk.  Maybe the Super Collection is just extra poorly organized.