I run both. I don't run a 'buy a pet' shop, I use the phone and get a choice of 6-8 animals. These can be completely modified in pet CAS so it doesn't really matter what you get. In NRAAS you can set max numbers of roaming animals in the hood, and say no to pets on community lots. I rarely see any pets other than the ones belonging to the active family.
Thanks for your response! thats what I do now when I want a pet I use the shelter option since I otherwise have neighborhood pet adoption unavailable. So it becomes a game of checking every few days to see if they got a pure bred dog or just another mutt (I think the chance is like 20% to be a pure bred dog/cat/horse in the shelter option).
However, my issue is when I use awesomemod storydriver no one seems to have pets adopted to their families so it gets a bit boring being the only family with a pet during the dog meetup etc
I could add manually but would get tedious so considering making neighborhood pet adoption available instead since that would at least force the game to spawn pets in families every now and then.