Having worked in construction and heavy industry before, and seen what happens in real life on construction jobs, I can tell you that while the dwarves do it more regularly than real humans, humans make some pretty absurd pathing errors too - sometimes leading to death.
I've certainly heard of (from reliable news-sources, but my GoogleNews-Fu isn't bringing anything up from on-line, which is probably because my recollection is from pre-web times) workers drilling out a large circle of concrete floor to be removed and standing
in the centre when the last crucial severing caused the chunk to cave-in, with them on it. The workers had ensured that no-one was standing below but had not imagined that they'd be putting themselves in the position of the person sawing off the tree branch he was sitting at the end of. (Which has also happened many, many times... enough to have been sent up and otherwise portrayed[1] in many fictional portrayals...)
On topic, I find all the possibilities raised quite interesting, but most seem to be adding layers of complexity which can be dealt with through playing style.
I'll admit that I'd like a phased-deconstruction method that doesn't need more micromanaging, but I rarely set solid wall-block constructions in place (at most, two tiles thick with access usually from both sides). I do, however, heavily rely upon the LIFO job ordering to set things in place like the most vital floors (lay out a small array, then cancel a "path" of floors that I need to reach to the edges and re-apply the floors, which then largely get completed as a priority, at least until I set up something else somewhere else) and breaking that would mean a whole lot of re-assessing my now instinctive strategies.
Perhaps it would be more applicable (to me) once we get [CONSTRUCTION_DESTROYER:n] creatures and/or sappers who attack and try to deconstruct walls. Or potentially wall-destroying siege machinery. Because then barriers the thickness of those in the auto-generated town-walls will have to come into their own... (And/or ones with water/magma-filled cores which inconvenience anyone who breaches them. Possibly even magma-farm-like regenerating walls with both!) I already design my forts with some currently unneeded anti-ConstructionDestroyer features, and so await the time when they are necessary (possibly even insufficient!) with excitement and not a little trepidation.
[1] And hilariously inverted, where the tree falls and the branch stays hovering, much to the consternation of the villain of the piece who
this time had taken care that he was on the trunk side and the protagonist was on the other...
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Topic: Dwarves planning their pathing before they build (Read 6829 times)