so from what ive gathered, all hearthfire really adds to the game is the new housing and adoption options. am i missing something? are there any new quests? monsters? items? NPC's? that make this expansion more than just the sims in elf land?? also, will i need hearthfire for anything in dawnguard or dragonborn? i ask because of the 3 expansions that are out this is one i dont really see myself ever taking advantage of, unless there is some new content besides houses and kids i wont be buying it. someone please enlighten me

No you dont need Heathfire to play DragonBorn or Dawnguard, although i recomend if you do want an amazing house

There are new items, but they are mostly food or construction items.
Example: You can bake new food in a stove, if you build a kitchen. And there's new things like clay, nails, glass, etc for construction.

I recommend it.
I was actually surprised at how much fun I had building my house and adopting a kid. It was a nice change of pace from hacking/slashing my way through dungeons.
Interacting with the adopted kids is fun, and a few events can happen around the house.
It's also very nice to have a home you designed yourself, with mannequins and lots of safe storage.

Also, the price is very low, so you don't have anything to loose.

As darkdragonself said, no it's not needed whatsoever for the next content otherwise they would have to state so on the next dlc which requires it.

Personally i don't mind heathfire its a nice little add on for your own house location's and gives you some thing's to do to waste some time, such as decorating, or storing all books in bookshelf's.
You have chests there which means you can smith/alchemy/enchant much faster due to been able to have those "structures" there.
You also can have a nice garden which can grow ingredient's which are hard to come by.

Either way i feel like it was very much worth the ￡1.74 or whatever i paid.

Edited first line due to some-one else posting

ya, the price is definitely right(especially for me as a ps3 user) but another one of my concerns is just how the DLC will operate on the ps3, im confident that bethesda will release it in a working condition, however, since the other expansions are a little bit more in-line with what i want out of skyrim i would hate to add in hearthfire just to have it drag down the performance of my game if i rarely use it. house's to me are just really pretty treasure dumps, i dont really need em to be all that fancy =p

I have all the released content on my Xbox, and everything works just fine.
(even with a lvl 80 character that has played through all the quests)