> even just like 3-5 actual cities per planet would be a start

This often takes me out of immersion in reading sci fi books. Every planet has one culture, one ruler, one major city. I know it's usually just a convenience but has the author never seen earth? Why would future human colonized planets not have hundreds of thousands of cities and competing factions?

Finding only one village on each planet is kind of laughable in the same way. The stage of human evolution where there was one village is such a tiny slice of time (if it ever even existed at all).