Nice off-topic. Sadly, I learned nothing before.
This is what I'm thinking: We need a consensus (or rather, Toady will give us one) for the Vanilla game, and what we do can go from there. Seeing as we're dealing with a fantasy world, we can really muck around with the day however we want.
1). Days should be kept as they are, 1/7th a week. A week is 1/4th of a month. A month is 1/3rd a season. A season is 1/4th a year. This is a clean set up. Raws should allow for longer weeks, or shorter weeks. Or variable days in the month. Or more months. or fewer seasons.
a). Night should last a week. Daytime should last a week. The two days in between should be "dusk" or "dawn." This leaves days being a rather arbitrary unit. Nocturnal creatures would then have a longer stay on the open map, rather than pathing in-and-out to keep up their habits.
b). Dwarves are cave-adaptable, which means the sun disorients them. This is not the same as nocturnal, should it ever be.
2). Costs of jobs should be RAW'd, should be adjustable.
3). Pathfinding should be cached.
4). Main topic: The players should define the scale they want to play in. If you want three hours between your Mountainhome caravan, have three hours. If you want 1 hour, have one-hour. This shouldn't be debatable. The best about this game is that style of the game is determined by the player, not by the game and the genre. If we can keep it a sandbox, then we shouldn't debate what is the best for EVERY player, other than admitting that every player needs to keep his options.
So, keep the current day/night cycle abstract from the work load; we can have fun tweaking this to our demands, but it shouldn't be done so in Vanilla. What it takes to haul an item should be seriously reconsidered. Multiple haulers and hand-offs should be used, instead of it taking a season to move a bin full of gold bars from point a to point b. What it takes to move from point A to point B should be pre-pathed and cached out, to save everyone a headache.
And we've already agreed that less-consistent caravans and ambushes and sieges are a plus.