On building worlds:
I've found that my players rarely care about the worlds I've created. It stymies their creativity because they "don't want to mess up what you have going." They don't know or care who the NPCs are, or what towns are which, or why all the Races banded together to try and kill all the Elves a hundred years ago, or any of that stuff. It's a lot of tl;dr, and they want their characters uninfluenced by my vision of what the world is.
Cue
Dawn of Worlds. Now my players and I make the world together. Dawn of Worlds takes almost no preparation, and it won't give you incredibly well-made locations, but it will give your world a history, a flavor, and a racial demographic that you and your players know and care about. It will also probably take as long as running a medium to long adventure. I'm on my third or fourth session of it now, and we're still not satisfied with where the world sits. Need a few empires to crumble. Should've drawn the map smaller to bring races into conflict more easily. Also, should've realized war (in Dawn of Worlds) is not half as resource-intensive as you would think.
But uh... anyway! You seem more worried about making dungeons into interesting locations that are relatively accurate. Why would you need to use Dwarf Fortress to do this? You already know how to plan a fortress; you play Dwarf Fortress! You know what kinds of locations a fortress might require, or what might be fun to build in or around one, and have a pretty good idea how you might design those. And if you don't, there are certainly screenshots of others' fortresses to stir your imagination (I always build my fortresses pretty much the same once I'm 4 z-levels under, so this would be a requirement for me).
If your hard work goes unseen, don't despair! If you bring that trick or event back at a later date, your players will
never know you've had it in waiting this long (this is known as "Shrodinger's Gun," a mix of Shrodinger's Cat and Chekov's Gun - credits to
The Angry DM). Be glad that they succeeded through their wits instead of only their dice, and move forward. If their good thinking gets them past a difficult place with relative ease, then good for them. Believe me, this is something I'm still working on, myself. When I build an encounter with a giant, swinging hammer of doom, I
really want someone to get hit by it. But if the party bypasses the hammer entirely, what is stopping me from using it later? Unless I made it really obvious that the hammer was there, nothing.