$2: Native Village, Hamlet
$3: Village, Shanty Town, Fishing Village
$4: Mining Village, Worker's Village, Walled Village, Farming Village
$5: City, Bazaar, Festival
As others have pointed out, Native Village sticks out as being incomparable here. I love the card, but less as an enabler (as these other cards are) as a strategy unto itself.
Of the remaining, Festival, Shanty Town, and City resist the Village classification to a lesser degree. Shanty Town has a number of uses, its Village-behavior being the weakest of them. City is a Village to start out, but at Level 2 -- the point at which Cities become desirable -- the Laboratory-like behavior is the more important by far. And Festival is usually a revenue generator first and chainer second. When it IS a chainer, it works best with Library/Watchtower than with straight +Cards, which is the exact reverse of when Villages are good.
So with those four cards culled, here's what I like:
1. Fishing Village: So strong, I'm still astonished it's priced at $3 instead of $4. The lack of draw weakens it significantly, but the next-turn effect is as if you'd just played a Bazaar. That and the fact that you need fewer of them to kickstart your chains from turn to turn make this the priority buy for almost every engine.
2. Worker's Village: An incredible general-purpose engine card. Many engines (Conspirator, Minion, Alchemist, etc) need +Buy, which is often a scarce resource. Worker's Villages can provide that for free when you get them for their Village functionality. And when your engine doesn't require Villages (Minion, Laboratory, etc), you can still usually drop them in for the +Buy without choking up the workings of your engine, as you would if your +Buy source was a terminal. The advent of Hamlet makes Worker's Village less uniquely suited to solving this problem so neatly, but it's still as useful as it ever was.
3. Bazaar: The +coin makes a world of difference and is probably more often worth more than a +buy. Like Worker's Village, they provide a seamless benefit even in engines where the Village effect isn't necessary. But as stated in the other thread, Bazaar's $5 cost is significant. The jump from $4 to $5 matters a lot more than the $3 to $4 jump for two reasons: One, the starting deck can get to $4 without much trouble, while $5 takes work. Two, $5 is beyond the reach of Workshop/Ironworks/Talisman, which are great ways to accumulate engine parts quickly.
That's my top 3, but I want to say something in Walled Village's defense. Yes, it's probably the weakest $4 village. But it's not a "bad card," as some say. It is, after all, strictly superior to vanilla Village, and the cost difference often just doesn't matter.
Also, a note on Mining Village: Conventional wisdom (apparently) is to trash early Mining Villages often. Figure that your average card value starts at $0.7, rising to $1+ quickly. That makes Mining Village's +1 card and its +$2 roughly equivalent to a one-shot Gold. That's a pretty huge boon in the early game.