First off, I'd like to preface this with the acknowledgement that yes, this will only be meaningful to modders, and yes, it's most likely work that Toady won't feel is worth the effort, but by god, if there's a suggestion forum then I'm going to use it on the off chance that it actually gets read.
As a modder, one thing that's bugging me is that a body part must have a [STANCE] token to wear boots and - more importantly - must
not have [STANCE] to not wear boots; the case is similar for gloves and [GRASP]. I tried to make a creature with wings that keep it upright without letting it fly, and the game stuck boots on the wings; I tried to make it so that the creature could only use those wings to stay upright, and now they can't wear shoes, despite having feet. A creature with grasping tentacles sticks gloves on the tentacles.
What I am suggesting is, how do I word this... Move the definition for clothing's target body parts out of hardcoding and into the raws. This way, modders - and Toady for that matter - could pick the desired body part for clothing to be worn on. This would fix one thing in the current game, at least - Toady mentions in the raws for greaves that "
this item doesn't make much sense right now, but there aren't any item types you can tie on to your legs yet", in reference to the fact that
greaves are meant to be worn on the shins, rather than the thighs. This change would make it simple to target the shins, rather than having to hardcode a new category of clothing for that to occur.