This is a pretty large thread bump, but I just wanted to say that these ideas are still good ones. There's at least two ideas in the thread that are good, in fact. The usefulness of resizing stockpiles is fairly obvious.
Being able to copy/paste stockpile settings (specifically, the items it's configured to accept, not the 'shape' of the stockpile) would also be very useful, for the reasons stated, plus a few additional reasons:
1. If you have small, specialized stockpiles near certain workshops, and later decide to add more workshops of the same type, you can create duplicate stockpiles with minimal fuss.
2. Ditto if you're the type to do large-scale renovations on a fort as it matures, or even build a new, "final" fort configuration elsewhere on the map. Building new workshops in those cases is trivial; reestablishing the stockpile configuration can be quite a bit more annoying.
The game already has a bit of stockpile memory. If you use the custom stockpile settings option when building a new stockpile, it seems to remember the settings you used last time. From there it's probably not too difficult a step to be able to hover over any existing stockpile, and "paste" that stockpile's settings to the custom stockpile configuration page.