Without a doubt tilts, I think every serious Villager main should do themselves the favor of setting their c-stick to "attack" as it makes it much easier to do retreating fairs/bairs/Nairs. C-stick being set to smash is literally like glitched or something as when a direction is pressed on the C-stick, it stops the analog stick from registering any inputs, causing your fast falled fairs and bairs to be slower and not fast falled at all.
Its also a good practice in general to start becoming accustomed to pivot tilts which are really amazing and only limited by how fast your hands can be. Basically you can do a dance trot into an F-tilt or D-tilt which is essentially like canceling your run animation into a tilt. They are pretty difficult to do, with D-tilt being harder to perform because you have to manually turn around unlike f-tilt that automatically turns you around depending which direction you press on the c-stick, but this kind of stuff makes villagers punish options/approach so much better and safer imo. Using the C-stick to do the tilts obviously makes this process significantly easier than without it given the precision required to do tilts quickly.