It is nice to dream. I'd love to see this all happen, but Toady will be old, gray, and have a 10 foot long beard by the time it comes to pass.
Relatively speaking, this should be fairly easy to code.
Creating a more complex decision algorithm isn't nearly as difficult as creating the framework for dwarves to make decisions and pathfind and know how to operate workshops or machines or any of the other things dwarves already do.
This just asks the dwarf to roll a die against a chart of the things he or she is tasked with doing, needs to do, or wants to do, weighted by the severity and necessity of the action, and shaped by their personality traits and view of the society they are in. (I.E. how badly do they need to eat versus how much of a workaholic they are?)
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Look at that, another post that was going to be a brief sharing of my thoughts turned into a wall of text I'm having too much fun with this thread.
Something I understand entirely too well. (Have you seen my
latest work? I'm still only about half done with writing the whole proposal.)
I can understand the notion of having a hard barrier you have to accept to walk through, and think that such a thing can be beneficial.
The problem I see is that I don't want it to be a sudden leap in resolution. I don't want you to have a fortress that is running fine one instant, and then suddenly has dwarves rebelling against the powers that be for a lack of amenities the instant you push a single button. I want to boil the frog slowly as the heat only gradually goes up, so that they don't particularly notice any sudden spike in the difficulty, just that it is getting more difficult.
As for "hardcoded", I would point out that all positions of nobility are now in the raws. This would have to be raw-ified as a matter of course.
I think that to an extent, a creation of a merchant class/guild representatives/enough children being born, you can have enough dwarves with jobs that don't demand their full time, as well, that are valuable enough to keep around, anyway. Some sort of commodity trader dwarf that can get money or valuables shipped in on demand so long as you keep him fat and happy, or children that need something constructive to do with their time, lest they start playing pranks.
Something like children accumulating in a fortress becoming a problem is a fairly good example of how something could be less based upon hitting specific milestones - a few children that just follow their mothers around are no problem. When they start getting numerous enough to get into little groups and then when those groups turn into gangs, then they start becoming a problem. They're more interested in the kids their own age than following their parents around anymore when there are more of them, and social cliques to get into or fail to get into. Now you have to give their idle hands something to do, lest they become the HFS's playthings.