I am pretty sure gale is still bugged. You can gain approval from him several times in a single conversation and he isn't even present for it. Everyone else has to be in your party in order to gain approval but gale apparently sees all.
It's almost a funny character trait that he is a horny dude. In one conversation you talk about him needing friends and if you say that you can be his friend he immediately hits on you. Buddy, if you didn't hit on everyone all the time then maybe you had more friends.
There are limits to how many trees, how big they can be and how close to the house you can have them. There is also a ton of car infrastructure that needs to be spread out across all the houses that takes up a good percent of the land no matter how you slice it
The most important difference though is that each person only has access to their stamp of nature that is 1% of the island. With the apartment all 100 people living there have access to 96% of the nature on the island.
It doesn't have to be just nature either. You can use it to build playgrounds, outdoor gyms, running tracks, community centers and tons of other public use things.