Wow, sounds like an expensive fancy wedding with lots of fiddly details. I just got married in the fall and we had a fantastic, fun, memorable and entertaining wedding with many complements, but definitely all about DIY and not very expensive (relatively).
I don't know about exactly stresses you, but you mention money and cost a lot in your post, so I'll tell you what we did, some might be directly useful, some might give you the idea of what you can let go without feeling like you are missing something important.
One piece of advice I read was that you pick a few things you think are key, and let the rest slide. Or you spend a lot of money and even hire a wedding planner. I don't think you can do everything that all the magazines etc tell you to do and do it without a lot of money.
We didn't have flowers on every table, we crafted other centerpieces and decorations well in advance. For the flowers we did have I went to the coop a month before the wedding and they lent me a book of flowers I could possibly buy which included which flowers were in season when. Then the day of their weekly order (arrange with them), I went in, ordered flowers directly from the book. Not everything I wanted was available so I changed on the fly. I looked at the flowers in the shop available that week and that helped me with my decision. Flowers were ~120 CHF. Used for 5 bouquets and 7? boutineers that my bridesmaid crafted and flowers on a few key tables with leftovers.
We did it all DIY. We had time in the morning, it was nice.
Definitely not for everyone! We bought tablecloth fabric online and sewed our own. We did it well in advance, learned a new skill, hems weren't the straightest but no one was checking it out anyway. Another friend I know bought paper tablecloths online (we did that with our apero tables). Glasses we needed we bought at Ikea when they had a sale.
I've never received a hand written wedding invitation, sounds like a nice expensive fancy detail $$$, or it's the important detail of your wedding you've always wanted and are willing to make it 'the thing you spend your money on'.
For serious DIY we made a photobooth, arduino and all. If in the future someone wants details PM me. If you aren't into soldering, coding, electricity, hacking etc don't bother. Our guests had a lot of fun with it and we had lots of fun photos for our wedding book.
One thing I would do differently is set up a nice entrance place for photos (or at the apero if you have that). Something like this was dead easy, super cheap and looked fantastic (we covered a whole ugly wall with this for behind the band)
http://rachelschultz.com/2012/07/04/...aper-backdrop/
We stapled gunned instead of hot glued and assembled it on the floor instead of a fancy hanging contraption.
Anyway, as the guests came to say congrats we then took a photo with them, and we didn't have a nice background for photos, but the crepe paper thing would have been great.
There are tons of games you can find on the internet. We started with paper and pencils at each seating place. At the beginning guests were asked to draw the person across from them and write down one interesting fact about that person and then we collected and displayed on a table the art. It got people talking and the pictures were interesting.
Another game that was organized by our MC (this is the person who usually figures out the games to entertain the wedding couple) was where all the guests were given a list of questions (unknown to us). Then they said all people where question X is true stand up and we had to look at the people and guess the question. They made lots of interesting punishments for us (sing a song etc).
For the dancing, we had a ceilidh band play and everyone had tons of fun learning how to dance. For the rest of the evening we just had my computer running Mixx set up on autoDJ. We pooled all our music collections and had originally set a play list, but once guests got the hang of running the program, some people had fun running the music, others had fun dancing, and others went to the quieter room to talk and drink. Older dance songs always went over really well since most people were familiar with them.
We didn't hire a photographer, we had a friend who is a good hobby photographer (with nice gear) and as our wedding present took the photos before the wedding of the families etc. We were very happy with the photos, but of course you can spend money for a real pro who gets you more awesome photos. This is an example of a detail we let slide and didn't regret.
In the end, we picked what was most important to us and let the rest of the details slide. We did a lot of DIY, and our friends and families were the kind of people who really get into that and helped and we had many comments how people loved to participate because they got to meet people and feel like a part of something, not just watching. That's how we and our guests had a fun time, not every group of people is like this.