Don't be hard on Sara.   She's done a lot for "simkind", including providing us with empty and cleaned up templates for starting with a clean neighbourdhood, and giving us endless advice.

What she said wasn't directed at you, rather at us to be cautious about what advice we provide to people whose level of competency is unknown.  As Alexander Pope said "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

SimPE is a complex, very powerful program that manipulates your game data.  It can trash your game in the blink of an eye, with practically no warning, as it's meant for the advanced users.  I've only used a tiny fraction of it to manipulate my character files.  It does so much more.  There are lots of tutorials on how to use it.  The trick is to focus on what you want to do, and search for tutorials on that.

You might want to use Sim Enhancer http://www.sims2programs.com/.  It's a program to manipulate your character data, but with a more user friendly interface.  Some people swear by it. It's like Mac vs Microsoft.  The only problem is that it's not free and some people have complained that the guy who wrote it provides you with piss-poor service.  But anyway.

I am considering writing a tutorial on how to "beautify" an existing neighbourhood, by making over your townies and NPC's.  Starting over is a good option, but not everyone is ready to do that.

Yup, and we all went through the same initiation here -- some survive, many don't.  Deal with it....

Now let us all sit back and wait for STLBailey, with her bright red font, to come crying about her neighborhood exploding. If she doesn't, we can assume she gets a "passing" on the common sense test. However, the fact that she neither knows who Inge is or what a "teleporter bush" is  (perhaps one of the most commonly and widely used hacks), does not bode well as far as her ability to successfully use a complicated tool that shreds critical neighborhood files....

1. It had a newbie who at first glance appeared to be of above-average intelligence (note the lack of horrific mangling of the English language in the first post), and yet turned out to be a BBS escapee after all.

2. It had another newbie, who definitely had a BBS aura around her, and who was apparently suicidal... that's really the only reason someone who doesn't seem to have ever downloaded a hack for the game before would want to go poking into the game files with one of Pescado's advanced tools.

3. At least one of the newbies was twirled around and given a shove in the general direction of a cliff.

4. It had high drama, punctuated by frequent use of multiple exclamation and question marks ("You didn't backup?!?") and CAPS LOCK freaking out.

5. It was the middle of the night, and I was hopped up on coffee and feeling very mean for some reason.

And of course Pescado pointing and laughing is always funny.

ack.  No.  Put that mouse down and step away from the computer s-l-o-w-l-y.
two) A better, sneakier, solution would be this.  Keep your townies, but spruce them up.  Use  Inge's teleport bush to drop them into your secret laboratory and use DMA's "thingie" to perform surgery on them.  You can also use it to change their appearance, buy and change their clothing.  Voila.  New and improved townies, without increasing the bloat in your neighbourdhood. 

If you're a perfectionist, you might also fix up their genetics in SimsPE to be sure that they pass off their good looks to their kids.  Or not.  that might make for interesting stories lol.