"The pit of doom" - Choices?

So, one of the things people mentioned when seeing the Pit of Doom (something that appears to be quite obviously a bandaid to counteract the heavy F2P design of Godus at this point in time) is that the Pit of Doom seems to be a very evil oriented mechanism.
And why isn't this counterbalanced with a neutral and/or good alternative?

So just having some random thoughts bouncing around in my head - what WOULD be a good alternative?
Well if we remain in the realm of sacrifice, the obvious alternative would be animals.

Balancing aside, the method of sacrificing people is a sound one. But it just doesn't really work just yet. Lets assume for a second that this mechanism COULD be balanced properly.
How would that compare to sacrificing animals?

So sacrificing people has the following consequences:
 - You get a lengthy respawn timer to refill the house you just robbed off its builder.
 - You get a negative happiness penalty which affects the game in the Astari mechanic currently (unless you've dealt with them already) and likely will have further repercussions in the future.
 - You lose population in exchange for gems, a morally questionable mechanic - but as these countless of followers are rather useless in the grand scheme its a small price to pay.

So what would sacrificing animals entail?
For starters, we could either alter or expand the current mechanic for food. We'd get some pig/cow/sheep farms instead of wheatfields that produce X 'food' per 'time' (to be properly balanced, no insane timers as we have right now...) and sacrificing these animals would yield gems instead of food from that plot. Granted, the yield from an animal would have to be balanced against the yield from a follower in a moral perspective.
However from a purely practical perspective, these animals would DIRECTLY influence my ability to expand whereas the followers just sit on their asses and eat food (hint, I value my ability to continue playing more than I do these random Molyneuxs and Attridges)

An alternative would be to get actual wildlife in the game, a regenerating expanding pool of animals dependant on natural food and habitat. If the player decides to cut down swathes of forest, there is less wildlife to get and it'll be much farther out. Taking more time to get it to the butchershop Pit of Doom.
Both mechanics would be much more tied into a potential core gameplay and would provide alternatives to sacrificing people.



Ofcourse, both mechanics still rely on sacrifice. And I would imagine that some people wouldn't want to sacrifice... So we'd need an alternative for that aswell.
Which leads me to the following - Stop forcing structures onto us. Allow us to decide whether we want to place something and where we want it.
If a player doesn't want to sacrifice stuff, allow him or her NOT to have a Pit of Doom in the middle of his starting zone.
If a player wants to move it or place them dotted around his empire (late game), allow the player to do so aswell (for a resource-based price).

It'd be real easy to do this, and wouldn't really alter much to the gameplay itself. As for alternate methods of gem acquisition that would fall inline with sacrifice and are 'good' - I can't say I can think of some that would balance out well and 'fit in' at this point in time, but I'm sure my fellow forummembers would be far too eager to offer alternatives.