I hate that they trashed the sassy/"offending" attitudes villagers apparently had.
I understand their thinking-process (I really do) and from a marketing perspective this propably was the right move but when I see that there used to be progress that really made you "work" for your connection (never played one of the old titles) it's a little sad how "vanilla" every villager feels now.
The 'sass' from Population Growing was actually creative liberties when translating the game from Japanese. So NoA just decided to go with a more crass/rude dialogue. I don't have any examples on my hand, but that's apparently what has been confirmed at this point.
The villager's are at their weakest in NH. Really everything pretty much was put on the back burner for terraforming and designing. Which kind of hurt it pre-update since it felt like we paid full price for early access/beta-testing. With all the other games, everything was accessible to us from the start. So if you were done mayoral duties/pwp for the day, you had a bunch of other choices to get involved in.
When you were done terraforming/designing, there was much less to do. Which obviously made how weak the villager's interactions were glaringly obvious. NL wasn't carried by the villagers by any means, but there was so much more to do at the start that it wasn't as noticeable. With NH they cut so much content that it was hard not to notice.
I do miss how the villager's warmed up to you over time. I miss the megaphone that showed their level of friendship where they would react differently if you called their name (looking around confused, a wave, gleeful waving) sitting on a bench with them and having them have a big grin with high friendship, playing hide-and-seek ect.
Speaking of the bare-bones launch, I remembered how they time-locked everything from 2020. You can't tell me that it took them an entire month to work/code in a holiday (since that's mainly what 2020 updates were)