I'm wanting to make it so there are only two NPCs per type in the pre-made neighborhoods, one male and one female. The way Maxis has it, there are usually three, sometimes four NPCs per type. There's the option of deleting the excess ones, but some of them I'm uncomfortable with deleting, such as the driver NPC (you see them in carpools, school buses, etc.) because they have incomplete character data.

Is it dangerous to "hide" these NPCs by placing them in the "Default" (Uneditable) bin (or 'Household') in SimPE? This is where NPCs such as the Grim Reaper and Therapist are stored. It appears you can change the bin by editing the Family Instance, which you can find in the Overview tab for an individual Sim. I did find I also needed to manually add them to the Default household using the FAMi Editor in the More.../Open Family section to get it to stick.

I'm using J.M. Pescado's "antiredundancy" mod to prevent the game from spawning new NPCs to replace the hidden ones, too. I haven't noticed anything weird going on in my tester hood, and I've checked it with HoodChecker, but I want to be sure going forward that this is safe.

Thank you.

Oh, yes, it's safe, but deleting carpool drivers is safe too, although I don't see the benefit of having two instead of three, and bear in mind that the game will end up generating another one at some point when it needs a third one (say you have a carpool and the schoolbus on the lot and the nanny arrives or leaves, or the Bon Voyage taxi arrives, or someone else in the household is promoted or fired after a chance card, ....).

I was looking to minimize the amount of Sims in my neighborhood, but I might think about keeping three of each and just hiding the extra fourth ones where they crop up. I like everything to be even, I guess.

I figured that much

I really think two carpool drivers is too little, you always end up needing a third one, and that would make four in the end (the functional two, the "Default" one and the newly generated one). Plus they're not the worst at clogging the hood since they don't do much when you don't see them. They do get memories of the sims they drive being promoted or such, I sometimes delete those in SimPE when I see them because they're useless, the drivers don't chat so they won't share those memories. They also accumulate memories of having travelled to islands, mountains or Far East, when they appear there, those can be wiped too but they're also probably not so heavy so ignoring them is fine.

I wouldn't touch NPCs tbh just because of how easily corruptible Sims 2 is