I, too, help my villagers to the berry bush to get my food supply up quickly. I usually only use 2-3 villagers, then I cut back. Once I have my crops, I rotate villagers so they can all have farming experience. My food always gets blown alway in a storm or goes moldy...this only happens though when I have a ton of villagers. At this point, I put all my villagers on swimming (most already know how albeit not happy campers about getting wet.) I help them back down to the water...saves time and gets food bin filled quickly.

I am also careful NOT to have so many villagers doing building. I don't want to spoil anything, but you will lose in the end this way. Nuf said.

In several games I had a man who wanted to go inside constantly with the whole village. Boy, do I ever have to be careful when my star builder is a woman AND wants him too!

After a while you get to sort of know the dud villagers practically from birth; I use them for research.