I'll give that a shot. I paused the game, did a hotsync, and went to bed. I'll see how this looks this morning.

I may also just drop the difficulty down to easy. I wasn't looking for a pushover easy sort of game here but it looks like I might need it if these villagers are to survive!

How do you currently have the relative difficulties setup? My assumption would be that easy limits the number of truly nasty island events, even things that should be fatal would just leave your villagers near death. Villagers would not die unless severely neglected, i.e. you haven't picked the game up in 48 hours. Bottlenecks and roadblocks would not be as fatal. If you don't make farming a priority, you can run the berry bush out and then see "oh my, I need to expand my food source." There's leeway for exploration and experimentation. Your warning that you're going down the wrong path will be sick or starving villagers, not losing the whole game.

Normal would increase the likelihood of death from neglect and poor planning but would keep the roadblocks and bottlenecks from being 100% fatal to your entire game. The key is, you don't need prior knowledge coming into the game. I lost one of my first serious attempts at a village because they ran out of food before I had farming researched. I had no idea when I started that the berry bush was such a limited resource. I saw the farm and thought "Ah, this must be for when I want to expand my population. Create more food sources, then make babies." I feel like I need to be reading a cheat guide rather than just exploring with a little due caution.

Hard should be for the people who have already beaten the game the first time around. They're familiar with all the technology and the best way to create a village and now they have to put that knowledge to work since there's no slack. If they don't do things in the right order, they'll run out of food and fail.