In my experience, you won't get raided if enemy factions like you. Obviously this isn't always possible tho.
In lieu of being everybody's friend, and making the developers recreate all the villages with new palisades added, it would be good if we could assign one of our parties to patrol our fiefs, take out looters and hideouts and enemy parties and not be available to armies. We have 3 extra parties, surely we can fulfil our feudal obligations by giving up 2 of them.
Either that, or if your economy can take it, it would be good to be able to up-garrison towns by seconding a percentage of city/castle troops to the villages. There could even be a slider in a city menu - how many troops are stationed in the city on one side, and in the villages on the other.
At this stage it is probably easier just to add patrols, I agree with the last point - Garrisons should definitely act as small/medium patrols which can be controlled in the manage castle option.
Although I don't think the whole change to recreate villages should be disregarded- This would certainly add something that is missing to the game-
That is acting as a lord and protecting fiefs outside of war time and other small but useful elements- The game is just a war and expand grind with a dynasty system which seems pointless, smithing which is not used and out of place- It's like they're are trying to create a more authentic experience with features that aren't working, are not properly implemented or just not a priority for the community.
Whilst minor details, these things like fief development, feasts etc. add a huge amount to the player experience- It's just a shame that the community has lost faith in the developers given the disconnect in communication with players and the lack of real progress that the game has made since launch.
Sorry for the rant but you do have to ask yourself- what are TW doing and where is this all going wrong? We aren't talking about a tiny dev team with a low amount of funding here?