Yeah when I wanted Beau, I found a cycling thread that had him in boxes. I stalked it for about 8 hours non stop until he went into boxes and snagged him. It really is a pain waiting around, especially when you want to do other things etc. As people also said, there are village adoption tumblrs, and you can check reddit as well for cheaper prices. One of the main reasons I did such a huge turnip run (I spent from 8 AM to 11 PM at night buying and selling turnips) was so that I would have a guarantee of getting my next dreamie and not have to stalk a thread again. Stalking threads is not fun lol. I'm a little crazy though. I can do silly busy work for hours straight and it won't bother me.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AdoptMyVillager/new/
Island trick is fun. If you do go to the island, chop down all the trees in the middle of your island, pull up all the flowers (you can leave the bushes) and leave a few trees on the island. This will make mostly only expensive beetles spawn. Past 7:00 is a good time to start hunting them. If you want to TT (which TTing some hours forward won't hurt your game) you can go to 11:00 and have the other beetles spawn which will net in a lot of money as well. A general beetle run without the wealthy ordinance generally nets me 350k on average for 20 minutes. Wealthy ordinance is 20% more money, so just add 20% to that, and that's your average.
If you plan on doing turnips, you can either try TBT forums, or I also use reddit. Generally people do groups of two, and one group will take 20-30 minutes to sell. So if you post as the 8th person, AFK for a while, because it's not going to be your turn for over an hour xD Also since one locker takes 20-30 minutes to sell (A, B, and C tabs), if you do buy more lockers just make sure you can get them sold throughout the week. There's tons of people who do have high prices throughout the week, so it shouldn't be an issue.. but yeah all of it takes time. Even if you only have time for one locker sell, it's still going to get you 7-9 million total.. (minute 1.5 million for the amount spent on turnips.) So all in all it's pretty good. Dremie prices vary. A lot of even the most popular villagers can be seen sold for 5 million. I see an average of 10 quite often though (exception of Marshall). If you do two locker sells at least, you could get yourself a total of 14-18 million, and try to win an auction the next week.