If you mean being able to reach the goal when you say "compete" I agree almost all setting changes should allow that, but if you mean "winning" such as "reach this goal in the shortest possible time" there is no realistic chance someone not close to an optimal setting will "win". A competition in the traditional sense needs to provide the rules (and some people will cheat anyway, of course).
Another aspect is that some changes will modify the difficulty without the player being aware of it. Using DFHack, for instance, mostly provides convenience (unless you use the powerful command line things), but Performance Tweaks that removes contaminants can make a major difference if there are nasty versions of those about, even though the player just wanted to keep a decent FPS.
Getting modified raws trashed is nasty. That might be the reason LNP doesn't fix the lye in bucket in barrel bug, even though I understand it to be a raw error that should be easily fixed. It's a bit of work to compare the player's file with the default one and only patch if there is a complete match (or locate the buggy location and update only that part).
Temperature:
Wait a minute: If I get it correctly, you say the underground temperature range becomes 9200-10200 when the limits are set to -1000..+300, but are those limits for the underground realm only, or are they for the world as a whole? I would expect the underground to be a fair bit more stable than the surface.
I assume you've already established that the odd resulting range isn't caused by a limit out of bounds that's been brought back into range.
I guess with a single pole the gradient needs to cover the tropics to the pole, plus altitude effects. With no pole you COULD treat the range as a pole to tropics range and the world as a patch of a larger world, in which case the range within the generated world would be smaller. The only logical difference I see with two poles versus one is that the temperature gradient would be twice as large. Similarly, a smaller world would presumably get larger gradients. Again, I assume you've already covered this, and the stuff I write above is purely speculation: I have no knowledge on how it's actually done.
It sounds like the cold is bugged, at least at extreme temperatures. In real life cold generally preserves decayables, although stuff can become brittle; the main thing destroying things is ice crystal formation, and if that is repeated in a thaw/freeze cycle that can be quite destructive.
I would have thought there would be a demand for knowing what you're getting on an evil embark in order to avoid things you're not prepared for/interested in, and get the ones you want. It might be as simple as it not being easy to get hold of, but that doesn't seem to have stopped people in the past.
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Topic: Could someone please set me up an embark? (Read 7990 times)