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[Buugipopuu]

I had the following setup: Four adjacent workshops with input stockpiles to their north.  The input stockpiles had some stone in them that I wanted dumped (mostly moved there by my architect when he cleared the sites of the workshops).  I make a dumping zone that stretched from one side of the workshop cluster to the other running east to west in the corridor outside.  Every time a dwarf went to dump an object, they seemed to heavily prefer the northwestern corner of the dumping zone, to the point where 72 units of stone were clustered in the westmost 12 tiles of the zone.  I observe a similar behavior with stockpiles.  I had some food in a temporary food stockpile that I wanted transferring to my main one.  The temporary stockpile was directly south of the main one, yet the dwarves carried the food all the way to the northmost edge of the stockpile, meaning they walked an additional 30 steps for every barrel carried, when the average round-trip distance of an efficient path was something like 12 steps.

While improving pathfinding efficiency is something that would require a lot of coding to implement in most situations, this one has dwarves walking over the stockpiles or dumping zones they're filling from in order to give preference to the northwestern corner of the stockpile.  How hard can it be to have dwarves doing Dump Item or Store Item in Stockpile orders check to see if they're already standing in the destination Stockpile or Dumping Zone, and if they are, have them put what they're carrying down?  It just seems silly that all my workshops with stockpiles to their south are considerably more walk-efficient than the ones with stockpiles to their north just because the haulers in the north workshop insist on piling goods on the far wall of the stockpile, while the ones in the south insist on piling it against the rear wall.

[korora]

I think the problem is the dwarves have to reserve spots in the stockpile when they take the job to avoid conflicts, since you're not really supposed to have two barrels in the same tile in a stockpile. 

That said, I haven't noticed behavior like you describe in my dwarves, but then I don't put stockpiles next to my workshops.  For true efficiency, your stockpiles should be directly above or below your workshops, with stairs nearby.

[Buugipopuu]

They could just check for an unreserved stockpile tile below their feet, reserve it if it's there and drop their barrel if it has been reserved.

I usually go vertical, but this time I only had one soil layer (giant eagle infested mountain range separating a treeless waterless rocky waste from a treeless waterless black sand desert) to play with, so vertical stockpiles would have required lots of dumping somewhere.  The dumping I did have to do was from a corner of the mountain that clipped my workshop area.