Except that they would have been standing with Jesus and the blind man, not walking. Unless the whole miracle took place while Jesus and the blind man were walking?

“perhaps the men brought him from outside the village?”

Good point, Mark is silent on where the blind man hails from. He might have been from a neighboring village. It wouldn’t be the only time that someone comes to Jesus from a distance to be healed.

You would have to assume that Jesus was there for a while (giving word of his presence a chance to spread to the blind man’s home town) before the blind man showed up. Against that assumption is the fact that the blind man’s healing is the first thing mentioned about this particular trip to Bethsaida.

I don’t think the presence of men “like trees walking around” outside the village is a big problem. Some men had brought the blind man to Jesus and begged for his help; presumably they would have accompanied Jesus and the blind man out of the village, so these could be the men that the blind man saw.

Sending the blind man home with an instruction not to go into the village does sound a little odd, but only if we assume that he lived in the village; perhaps the men brought him from outside the village?

So I think we can make sense of the passage translating κωμη as village, there’s no conclusive reason internal to the passage to look for an alternative translation. It’s just the external references to Bethsaida as a city that cause problems.

Strong’s doesn’t have this meaning, though. Neither does any Lexicon I could find of Biblical Greek. Pangle was, of course, not dealing with Biblical Greek, so his translation may have been perfectly good for his purposes, but flawed here.

On the other hand, the passage doesn’t really make much sense if you think that Jesus took the blind man right out of Bethsaida. If he was not in the town, where did all these men come from whom he saw that looked like trees walking around. Also, Jesus commands the blind man to go home. But, Jesus says, don’t go back to the kome. If the kome is Bethsaida, how could the blind man follow that command? Wouldn’t he have to go into Bethsaida to go home?

The two terms are often used together in a way that suggests that there’s a contrast between them:

“Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages…” [Matthew 9:35a, NRSV]
“Whatever town or village you enter…” [Matthew 10:11, NRSV]
“Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages…” [Luke 8:1, NRSV]
“Jesus went through one town and village after another…” [Luke 13:22a, NRSV]

However, I don’t see why there couldn’t be borderline cases that could be described using either term; perhaps Bethsaida was such a case?