First off, I'm pretty dubious about your scope at best. Just dealing with the overhead of making something multiplayer / networked can take multiple person-months, and you're talking about doing that on *top* of some sort of fairly elaborate game.
Given your apparent background and practical scope, why not make a mini-game that could, hypothetically, be a module in some future endeavor? For instance, why not do a Dwarven Caravan Trader simulator? Each player starts with a caravan at the mountain home and a budget for trade goods, bribes, intelligence gathering, equipment, and so on. Once set up, they set out for one or a route of randomly-generated fortresses, which at this level are basically black boxes that consume inputs and produce outputs (note that "drama" and "magma" may both be outputs
Eventually, you bring your cargoes back to the Mountain Home, and see who made a profit and who gets demoted to pump operator.
The interface can be fairly simple, text-based or a simple web form to get started. There are existing board games that might provide some ideas, such as
"The Speicherstadt" which might be one interesting take on the Mountain Home end of things. Various systems in the "rail game" genre may also be a good source of ideas.
Once you've got a functioning prototype, you could then poke into DFhack and related utilities, and figure out how to "load" a DF world as your template for the civilizations, names, mountain homes, forts, resources, production values, etc.
If you use a license like 2-clause BSD, your work could then later become part of a larger project, perhaps even DF itself; or continue to develop (by you or a team) as a "side game" that allows people to expand their DF experience in a new direction that is not likely to be supported by mainline DF for several years yet, if at all.