+1 to supporting the right to rant, and I haven't even really played 47.04 yet. There's nothing wrong with having an extra strong reaction sometimes, especially labeled up front as a [rant] and with actual content that would count as constructive feedback instead of a rant in most internet communities! Just shows you care about the game.
ensure people stop turtling and to ensure that even a fort with a legendary adamantine clad military will keep having new challenges.
I consider turtling to be a legitimate tactic,
Also +1, thanks. Defense by ridiculous megaproject that is as dangerous to civilians as to invaders has been much more fun to me than micromanaging the psychological and hauling fallout of military combat. That play style means some level of turtling. I usually only train up fancy militaries as a way to add some variety or to make surface/cavern undead cleanup safer. (Since only a few things, like forgotten beasts, can path very far anymore.)
I have the same fear of digging invaders: they get better while my tools to deal with them remain the same
Another +1. It's hard to imagine adding digging invaders to the current game being workable, even if you get around the easier problems of fixing FPS loss by making tunnel backfill possible, and making it so stone isn't a limited resource. That doesn't even begin to address the universe of effectively unfixable problems with flooding or cave collapses, or having to construct some kind of spherical defenses against all directions.
Back on topic, my current plan for trying 47.04 is to turtle my main fortress completely and build a hermetically separated guest fortress as bait for random villainy. That's not too far off from defending against a sticky thralling dust with contaminant spread turned on. (Another favorite place to embark, and one of my most fun disasters was watching an entire military turn to thralls just from coming into proximity with the infected. They didn't even get many attacks in, just the contaminant spread got them. Okay, that was off-topic again. I've been inside by myself for two months.)
If you don't enjoy Dwarf Fortress, why play it at all? Negativity, and "oh Toady's so irresponsible making a free game that pushes boundaries I'm not interested in and doesn't fix the bugs I want him to fix" is just pointless.
I know you just care intensely about the game and the developer and want to defend it, but this doesn't read as that flavor of negative to me. I don't see anyone here threatening to cancel their Patreon or making personal attacks on the developers outside of expressing some frustration with a game mechanic, which is a bit of a time honored tradition as well. (Looking at You, Giant Mosquitoes that ate my embarks before their spawn population was adjusted.)
So please be careful any time you're straying into "if you don't like it, then go away" rhetorical territory. I know it's difficult, but try to de-escalate away from the "you [X]" phrases and stick to the game discussion in impersonal terms. (Uh, I just completely broke that rule by writing this. Well, crap, uh, imagine this was written by someone with better communication skills than me.)
We're all better for everyone being here and I trust that we've got a [VALUES_HONEST_FEEDBACK] cultural trait even when it's hard questions where nobody expects quick or easy answers.