One of the things I liked most about this game from the start was that this was a building game. One of the best parts of building streets was that if I kept them in a loop then the people never disappeared. It was like setting up train tracks. I was hoping that when I got my city completely finished I would be able to go back and make sure the loop was completed again (somewhere along the way I stopped the looping).
I loved having all the people around because it made this seem a lot more like a big city. As the city gets bigger, I would expect more citizens milling about. That said, if the people are crashing the game, well, I guess they have to go inside, but if there was a way to get them back the way they were before, that was really very cool.
It seems that whenever we have an update we go two steps forward and two steps back. I wouldn't worry so much if this was still in beta, but these issues are being brought to the live servers.