Once you put a building can not remove, you are forced to take up space on the map. Missing the option to remove a building/decorations
I'm sure this will be taken care of when the village edit mode is instated (Yeah I'm that positive it will happen).
Do the decorations take up too much space? I'm sure there is ample space on the island. Any personal experiences?
Thunder, once you get to higher PH levels you start having lots and lots of buildings. Also with my base I like to centralize storages, defenses, and my PH while on the outskirts I put my resource collectors which makes people pretty much choose which they want to attack, since swimming takes so long. Having decorations adds more land to my base and makes it easier for people to 3 star an attack.
When I see that I just drop a few Gunners down there and they can take out all the buildings in plenty of time. If they have some defenses it's usually just a Cannon or two and all that takes is 1 Brute and 3 or 4 Gunners, so you somewhat split the army but for the most part part I haven't really seen that help much. If it's really spread out, 1 unit for each spot.
I don't know, so far it's been working pretty well for me. They either never attack the collectors or they only attack the collectors.
+1 but most people who don't want them just stuff them in a map corner. They're not in the way, and you get the side-benefit of confusing attackers, who may think you have an outhouse or two hiding in there somewhere.