Just curious, as I'm thinking about buying the Sims 3...It sounds real fun, but I heard that there are rabbit holes! Sounds like it'll bring the game down a bit for me. Anyways, is there a way to replace the rabbit holes, with community lots you can actually go inside? I would like to know before I buy the game, that way I'll know if I should stick with Sims 2 or go ahead and buy Sims 3. Thank you!

Yeah, Jynx has got rugs and doors that allow you to build your own rabbit holes around them. They'll still vanish while they go to work, but they'll be able to interact with any objects you put inside them like any other community lot.

http://customsims3.com/forums/thread-53.html

Also, ani_ has done a great job opening up the rabbit holes as well.

http://www.modthesims.info/d/444244
http://www.modthesims.info/d/409607
http://www.modthesims.info/d/412721

Have the RH doors been fixed since Pets came out?

Yes, they have.

I'm wondering, is there any way of partially breaking up the remaining retail-based rabbitholes?

Solutions as of now:

• Restaurant- We have the food register, but it sells groceries as well. Duplicated products with usual rabbithole doors.
  
• Grocery Store- We have the food register, but it sells meals as well. Duplicated products with usual rabbithole doors.
  
• Bookstore- We have the book register. Duplicated products with usual rabbithole doors.
  
• Movie theatre will be broken up in Showtime
  
• Spa will likely never be broken up, will rely on rabbithole doors

Is there a possibility of creating job-only rabbithole doors that lack ability for sims to buy anything in them, and registers that sell only specific things? Maybe another version of ani's mods?

New solutions

• Restaurant- Meal-only register, employee only door
• Alternatively, option/tabletop object that allows sims to buy food directly at their tables. Said food then appears on table instead of sim's hands, which is more dignified than your sims serving themselves!
  
• Grocery Store- Grocery-only register, employee only door
  
• Bookstore- Book-only register, employee only door

Thanks guys so much! So all you do is download the rugs or the doors, place them in a community lot, and start building, say, a school or restaurant around them? How does it work? Are you able to interact with the waiter and watch the sim eat and such? Or if it's a school, interact and watch the sim learn?

You can't make playable schools. With the custom rugs, you can build what is inside the lot, but you can't actually do the things that you would do. Let's say you build a school and place the rug, if your kid goes to school, he will vanish. You won't see him, he can still use the things you have built, but in the time he has to be at school studying, he will just vanish like any other rabbit hole. Same with job-related rabbit holes. You can build the lot, add whatever you like, however, when the sim is supposed to be working, he'll disappear. Same with restaurants. There's no chef or the like. As long as it's a rabbit hole, your sim will disappear into it as always unless you tell the sim to do something else on that lot.

There's a way to simulate a restaurant, I saw it somewhere but can remember. It doesn't work like an official restaurant with waiters and chefs, but it comes as close as it can get.

Simply put, the rugs allow you to instead of having the shell that is a rabbit hole, you can build your custom one to your liking. However, if you use the rabbit holes features(go to work/school for example), the sim will still disappear.

If you have WA, you can use the book-register and food register. This way you can shop for groceries, books and eat a meal without using the RH. The game will randomly assign people from your town to tend the registers, or you can use Twallan's register mod to assign any Sim you want to tend it. For work reasons, if you still want your Sims to work in a restaurant, or a bookstore, you will need to add the RH rug/building into the town.

Oh yeah now I remember using that. I think I also tried making a restaurant in a residential lot, and then turning it into a community lot.

By the way I think the OP was talking about an actual real restaurant, with chefs and waiters and stuff so that's why I said it wasn't possible.