I'm planning on creating a new neighborhood with my own townies in it, and I'm following this tutorial. I understand most of it, but there are a few things I'm confused about. I see that the empty stealth hood templates get rid of the premade families in the bin, and I want to keep them. Do I need to use those templates to avoid townies and downtownies, or does the notownieregen mod do that on its own? For a neighborhood that has the bin families but no townies, which things do I need?

I also just installed Bon Voyage for the first time recently and vacation destinations are new to me. Does the notownieregen mod include locals and tourists, or do I need something else for them? Also (sorry for all the questions!), in a normal game, do locals/tourists look the same in every neighborhood like other townies, or are they random each time?

Thanks!!

I believe you do need the empty stealth hoods to avoid the EP townies (downtownies, social group townies etc) from being added to your neighborhood since iirc those sims are added by copying files from templates, not by the game generating new sims. You need the empty templates to prevent the copying, and the no regen mods to prevent the game from creating fresh townies. (I haven't done this process in a minute though so take what I said a little lightly!) But you could try these out and add the bin families in afterwards?
I can't say anything for certain about the locals and tourists. FWIW in my game the far east locals pool is replaced in the same way you would do a townie pool replacement, and the tourists are newly generated (they have cc hair and skin). I have notownieregen, nodormieregen, nossrespawn, and nostrayrespawn.

This is perfect, thank you! It looks like it will work for my neighborhood. Out of curiosity, what replacement are you using for the far east locals? I'm considering townie pool replacements for some future neighborhoods.

Yay! I'm glad to hear it. I'm using this set, it changes their names and faces but not genetics (as in hair/eye/skin color)

Thanks, this is great! It was bothering me that the far east locals weren't Asian. I think I actually won't mind letting the game generate locals if I have this.

They still won't look Asian, but you could change their looks by sim surgery in simPE/