I spent some time wandering around Ur yesterday. Even though gathering resources in Shimla Mirch was more time intensive than following a resource route through Home Streets, it was much more enjoyable.
Why?
The organic design of the environment. Streets that didn't look like they came out of a cookie-cutter with evenly spaced resources. A modulated landscape that you can climb on and explore its nooks and crannies. By comparison, home streets are boring. Ur, by contrast, is full of creative, holistic environments and (formerly) neighborhoods.
Home streets have no sense of place (intentionally, perhaps, but disconcertingly). Unlike in Ur, when you wander around you see the same landscapes from the same perspective over and over, but they have no continuity. In Ur, by contrast, you see stuff in the background from different vantage points as you navigate the world and the overall environment persists throughout a region. There is a pervasive PLACINESS, which is wonderful. Things fit together.
In home streets, you can't even count on being able to go back to the street you just came from. The environment swaps wildly from one street to the next. There's no map. You're not, in fact, anywhere specific at all.
We've lost the connection between place and resources. In just the same way as you can now buy strawberries in the depths of winter IRL, you can now grow jellisacs in a mountain meadow. (Actually, I think there ought to be bonuses of some kind for having the background-appropriate resources, or penalties for the inappropriate ones. Maybe the mismatched resources could wear out more quickly.)
Now that we've lost the primary place-cohesion that was one of the defining aspects of the game, we desperately need some other set of underlying ideas/stories to give the game a meaning beyond My Glitchy Crib and My Fabu Wardrobe, fun as they are.
I dearly, dearly wish that we had been able to share home streets with others. That would have been a huge step toward creating a sense of place, socially. It's hard for me to imagine, just now, how group halls could work in such a way as to be a satisfactory substitute for a shared street, but I hope that I'm wrong about that.
I don't want to just live inside my own head (/home). I do enough of that—really, trust me, more than enough—in real life.