Despite having a few mediocre episodes, season 7 features some exceptional episodes- Bart Sells His Soul may be the best, but Mother Simpson, Marge Be Not Proud and Summer of 4 Ft. 2 are great too. Bart Sells His Soul was aired early in the season because, as they say in the DVD commentary, they saw it as a strong Bart episode. Home Sweet Homediddly-Dumb-Doodily aired just before it, and it was viewed as a strong episode dealing with the family as a whole.
In it, Bart gets lice after playing with a monkey and the school blames the parents, and Lisa is in bad condition too after being roughed up by bullies. Government people inspect the Simpsons' house at one of the rare times that Marge has taken a break from cleaning, and seeing it's a mess, take Bart, Lisa and Maggie to a foster home. That foster home, as it turns out, is just next door, the Flanders' house. The kids, except Maggie, have trouble adjusting to their new home and miss their parents.
The brilliance of The Simpsons is that the family is dysfunctional but loving at the same time. And we can see that here- the Simpsons miss each other deeply, despite the fact that they're not perfect, and in fact the perfect Flanders family is strange and terrible, maybe even repulsive. This episode sticks up for the kinds of families that elitists look down on. Despite the sad tone of the story, it scores some laughs, particularly in the first half, and that's no surprise given that it's from Jon Vitti, the writer of Lisa's Substitute which may be the best Simpsons episode of all time. Home Sweet Homediddly-Dumb-Doodily itself is probably top 25 material.
