Honestly, the only thing that makes the villages in Minecraft remotely useful are mods like Thaumcraft, Tinker's Construct, and Mystcraft. Otherwise, villages are more along the lines of places for me to raid and nick all their goodies. With mods, I've actually got some incentive to keep one or two of the bastards alive.
I was thinking about, in a SSP world, making a Direwolf20-style Railcraft villager sorting/breeding system, except I'll be a little less nice...by putting the undesirables thru a MFR grinder for their tasty, tasty essence.
The villages gave me the impression that Notch was just running out of ideas for updates and figured he could rip off the Millonaire (or however its spelled) mod and that'd do, only his version was vastly inferior in every way. Doesn't help that the villagers did literally nothing (they wouldn't even react to taking damage) until very recently.
Case in point: the Horse Update. Thought, Dr. Zhark, from what I can recall, actually works with Mojang, now. Shit, the only good mod ripoff Mojang did was the hoppers they stole from BuildCraft, which actually brought a small element of actual, proper fucking automation to Minecraft that didn't require an ungodly amount of redstone and/or piston work.
Just so long as they stay the hell away from XyCraft and Mystcraft. Those two, most especially, are far too awesome to merit Mojang fucking them up with a shitty ripoff. Fuck, I'm half-tempted to just remove the cow sounds from my game entirely, because I can't describe how much I HATE how they sound, nowadays. Its, like...actually, properly disgusting. Though, I now have less than zero problems breeding them for automated slaughter.
