I haven't played 1.09e yet, but have played 1.07-1.09 a fair bit without hero problems (ignoring the 1.08 hiccup).
I spent some time playing around with starting new games and pushing Ctrl+U to reveal the map over and over again (cheats enabled obviously). Some games have very few heroes and some have lots. Some games the nearest hero is half-way across the map and other times there's 3+ within 10 squares of where you start.
I haven't paid a lot of attention to the recruitment tech so I don't know how it works exactly, but it may be that it just spawns more heroes around the map in the same random fashion. So it may be you just got really unlucky that game.
