there is already story telling amongst the villagers, amongst many other actions if you watch carefully

The villagers do quite a few wacky things.. it makes them fun to watch and follow. In a way they are kinda like the fish in ft, but they are much more versitile and unpredictable. try following one or two around for a while once your village is fairly advanced, they can be very amusing.

Use of D-Pad or Up/Down buttons to scroll through the Villager Detail, would be nice. Especially if your right handed, since you have to reach across the face of the screen to scroll.

I was going to suggest information about family trees, but that might turn out to be too creepy (all the inbreeding.) I do think that the women should be able to hire babysitters or at least turn the kids over to some male villager for a while. It's hard to explain to my 7 yr old son why only the mommies stop working to take care of the kids (almost worse than explaining why they are going inside the huts and coming out with babies.)

Am I correct in assuming, then, that we don't have to worry about who is related to whom when we force them to "go inside?"

If they will 'go inside' together, then it's OK that they're breeding!

I thought briefly about the inbreeding issue, but imagine my surprise when three villages went inside! I had two romantics on their way in and a third (male) followed them in. They remained together and emerged one after another at the expected time. I swear it! I figured it was an easter egg put in by an ornery programmer.

That can happen in a number of ways. The most common one is that one of the pair that's headed inside is intercepted by another villager on the way to the hut and goes off to do something else. Another common one is that an elderly villager mates with one much younger, and takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to get to the hut. Anything could happen along the way when you're moving like a snail!

I actually had the same thing happen to me, but I think that that 3rd person's partner just got distracted on the way inside!! whoo hoo party!