Ok, it's time for more of "SB's Cautionary Tales of Woe", following up after my "experience" with Serena (whom I still want to murder for being such a heinous bitch)...
I got my town to "Perfect" status last night, but in order to do this, you'll NEED to follow this guide here:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/wii/file/933195/54906Bottom line, remember the GC version of AC and the "acre" system where all parts of the town were plotted on a grid which you could reference by acre A1, D4, etc.?
Although we don't have the grid, the acres are STILL THERE! And to make matters worse, the game is judging you on how well you've planted your trees via acre, despite the fact THAT YOU HAVE NO FRIGGIN' CLUE WHERE THE ACRE BOUNDARIES ARE!!!
And that's not the worst of it: since the game wants you to have 12-16 trees per acre, Pelly/Phyllis will tell you what the problem is with the
most pressing acre at the time. In other words, if one acre has 9 trees and another has 20, she'll tell you that there "Are too many trees in some areas." giving you abso-fucking-lutely no idea where the trees actually need culling. You can go out and thin some areas which look too dense, but density doesn't matter: it's purely based upon the number of trees per acre (provided you can run a full circle around every tree). Then, after you've cut some trees down, she'll tell you that there aren't enough trees in some areas because now the acre with 9 has become the more "pressing" issue.
This is like someone asking you to scratch their back but they won't tell you where it itches and will yell at you for scratching anywhere BUT where it itches.
So the bottom line is that you could try to get a perfect town for months of random cutting and replanting and still never actually achieve perfect town status because the game uses a piss-poor system of alerting you to the source of the problem.
I find it rather ironic that the map system has been refined so they could use it to show us certain specific areas, like where to put a new bridge or show us which houses we could live in, yet no one on the team thought to use that same system to show players WHERE the goddamn town needs more trees or fewer trees.
So again, if you plan to go for perfect town status, use that guide. You're pretty much fucked if you don't.