Villagers aren't that hard to get though, the simplest ways being looking for a village with surviving villagers or finding emeralds for a spawn egg as the recipe was added. There are other ways though, like if you can get lucky and find one of the gravestone mausoleums and can get a nether star you can build an altar which lets you resurrect villagers, just find a villager and run around looking for all the graves to resurrect and you're set with resurrecting each villager for only 20 levels.not so easy without villagers
Actually @DrasticDemise maybe it's worth looking into that a bit more? They're fairly useful with villagers although harder to get with you disabling catacombs and them needing a nether star, if you lowered the cost of building one they could provide a decent alternate way to get villagers so that people can still get them but they'll need to find a village instead of just collecting an egg and eight emeralds, that and the xp cost. Also there seems to be a bug where they'll break instantly regardless of what tool you use, bad because if you don't have at least an iron pick they won't drop and they require blocks that only spawn in a specific dungeon and a nether star to craft.