"Village Base - What is your approach?" Topic

II have tried lots of options for village bases artistically. My workaday option is just a bit of grey card used to provide a fixed base for my 1/144 houses, a necessity for a dense housing area to prevent accidental drift. The roads are sometimes laid on top loosely mainly to indicate thoroughfares and road size. They do tent to drift a bit but this has no practical impact on the game. I have also printed the roads on the base which fixes the drift. However it does not match my other card roads so it really does not improve looks. I have glued sections of roads on the base, so they match the rest of the roads but it's a pain and only a bit of an artistic improvement, probably not enough to justify the effort.
Then there is the base, I have tried simple patterns on the basic card, but I am not sure I feel they look better for this. To be honest some in my club have bought a battle mat clearly to represent an urban area and placed buildings on it. However it to me does not make much of an improvement, but some.
There is the option to make a proper base for a single village configuration with the pavements curving correctly and all the paving stones of the walkways accurately aligned with the road, but frankly that is WAY too much work as I have a LOT of village configurations.
So do you make it perfect at a huge cost in time or do like me just make do with less than perfect for expediency? Have you got a trick or a secret Jpg that makes an ideal looking base with minimal effort? Where do you stand on this issue?