I'm also going for Smile Isle at the moment. I have 85 of them left! We'll get there, some day.
I'm skeptical of the 'only two requests per hour' rule, I also read that somewhere but I've yet to try to disprove it because talking to villagers for that long is not fun. Usually I just do one or two now, then one or two more in a few hours, and so on. It's the only way I'm going to be able to keep the motivation to do this (although I will need maybe two or three more months).
One interesting thing I did notice, is that I've done so many requests at this point, yet my villagers and their homes seem mostly untouched. You'd expect that, after 215 favours, their houses would be all messed up? It's what I expected, and the plan was to fix their homes after I get the achievement. But none of them are displaying any bugs or fish, I know that for sure, and wardrobe issues have been rare.
Current hypothesis: Could it be that only requests that you get from direct pings give them new items to wear or display? Most deliveries I do, the villager just straight up gives me the item inside or asks me to guess what it is (furniture/clothing, I always pick clothing to be safe, because they'll give it to me instead). I'm going to have to keep track of this, I guess.
It's either that, or the chance of them displaying or wearing an item is just very, very low. If someone else is also comfortable with gifting their villagers stuff, I'd love to hear your experiences. Maybe I'm just lucky?
