I have a similar experience; my wife and I spent about $4000 on our wedding,and had about 150 guests, and it was a perfectly lovely (if not particularly fancy) ceremony. We got sandwichs, cheese & crackers, and fruit trays (plus some baked goods my wife and some friends made) for the meal, it worked out to about $2 a person, and no one left hungry. The reception was in the church hall, my wife got her dress off Kijiji (think Canadian Craigslist), and I just wore the suit I already owned (why waste enough money to buy a new suit on renting a tux? I looked sharp, and no one cares how the groom's dressed anyway). We bought flowers for the bouquets, but none for decoration (again, why? where does it make the experience better?) Photography was probably our biggest single expense, and we got that cheaply because my wife knew a woman who was just getting her business started and wanted to build a portfolio (our wedding photos are great, and we have digital copies of all of them we can make as many prints of as we want).

The short version is we planned our wedding with a mindset of "we want as many of the people we care about to be able to share this day with us as possible, and since we have a limited budget we're only going to spend it on things that make a positive difference in the day".