With my new town I have been having a LOT of trouble with plot resetting to get villagers to live where I want. It took literal, real time, days of resetting to get Molly in place. And now I'm resetting Ankha's house plot- during a dozen resets so far she has consistently selected only 2 different locations. She'll stay in one for 2 or 3 resets, go back to the other one for a couple,  and then go back to the previous one for a couple. @-@ I even put patterns in the spots other villagers were trying to move to, that I didn't want them in, to prevent Ankha from using those places. The two plots she's favoring are awful. They are VERY close to other villager houses and a pwp.

I don't recall it being this difficult in my old town, before the amiibo update. Was it always this hard, and was I just lucky? Has anyone else been having this much trouble?

Yes. Well, kind of. I don't plot reset. However I have noticed that new villagers are consistently picking the exact same spots over and over.
I want mine to move into random places and they are not

BulbasaurLover
How weird! Even when you want them to move all around they won't. Seems like the game has changed, honestly.