It's more of a battle between simple things, and exciting things. The lack of vanilla villagers is mostly because of how unexciting and low-hanging fruit they are compared to e.g. Recruiter.
There was a village that was, cantrip, +1 Villager; man it's fine, you can argue about, does it need to cost $5, but it's nice. The village that's always there when you need it. But really, the experience it gives is the villager experience, and other cards are giving us that experience. Another village just came with +2 Villagers; we already have that experience too.
I'm not against low-hanging fruit, and love to do vanilla stuff when I can. Acting Troupe and Lackeys are both exceptionally simple +villagers cards; sure they're not pure +'s but man, that's not the only way to be super simple.
Cantrip villager was the first villager card in the file. Soon there were a bunch though. It didn't provide an experience we weren't getting other ways, and eventually it was crowded out. It was fine, but every card is trying to add something, and what it added was just "villagers." That isn't always how it goes. Inventor is just a Bridge-Workshop, but the experience seemed different enough and there it is in the set.
Another thing is, if you have a sleek pretty vanilla card, wait this could be a good place to slap that when-gain or whatever you wanted to fit in the set somehow. Patron could have just been the top, but I had this ability to do and that was a good place to do it. So this also cuts into vanilla cards. And hey Baker has one of those, it's not vanilla at all, certainly not more vanilla than Lackeys and Acting Troupe.