Bugs weren't the problem... it was all the goddamn micromanagement you had to do to be successful.
The actual objective was to NOT micromanage, let your villagers learn on their own, and then get to spend all your time teaching your creature and taking over other towns through miracles.
You could best do this by not assigning people jobs. You needed to assign a small few to be your buliders, maybe one or two lumberjacks, but overall they, if left alone, would begin getting their own resources as long as you made sure they were nearby. Basically, build a few feilds, make sure some forrests are fairly close to town, and let the villagers do their own fetching depending on what they feel they most need.
Its important to remember when playing B&W that you don't need food or wood, you just need villagers, they are the only resource with a direct effect on you as a god, but you need to make sure that they at least have the basics to survive (food and shelter).
The game is all about AI, the tutorial spent too much time trumpetting only the creature AI (which is super impressive), while it should have at least made mention of the fact that villagers run on a simple version of the same AI as long as you don't give them a specific job.
Peter Molyneux's tribute to "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime."
edit: as for B&W2, can't wait. Looks like they expanded on how you can customize your towns. Between that and making a civilization step up to actually having believer v. believer war are all the upgrades I think this game really needs. Molyneux has talked about how he'd like to see B&W series travel through about 6 iterations, each one set a major step up in human society.
edit 2:
We're really getting the exact same initial choice of creature as with the last game?
No, the cow and arangatan are both still present, but the tiger has been replaced with the lion and wolf. I'm sure they'll once again to creature bonuses with EB like they did last time, its just such an easy bonus to throw in there. Hopefully they choose something other than a horse though. ;P