It's impossible to build dense villages today, which is more or less the opposite of the idea of a village: a lot of people in a small place. 5 tiles distances in villages with private plots is quite a big distance, and town planners know the struggle it is to pave useless roads between plots.
I understand that there must be a distance between normal pclaims, otherwise people would build impenetrable walls of claims around another claim for exemple. However, if a claim is inside a village, I see no way the mechanics of minimum distance could be really abused. Reduce it either to either 0, 1 or 3 tiles and our life will be much easier.