Wholly and completely disagree. I like having a house because I like having a house. I do not care about literally any of my neighbors, of which I can count on one hand the number of whom I have actually seen in the last three years, and I would not care if everyone and their mother had access to housing in this game.
I don't expect SE to overhaul the system. If they planned to they'd have done it ages ago instead of slapping a bunch of ugly paint and weird bandaids on it. But I'm very much not on board with the "keep it limited so it's ***special***" thing