I use multiple overlapping burrows. I'm not sure from your posts whether you know that a dwarf can belong to several burrows at once?
For example, when I first embark I designate the area I'll be digging into and setting up a quick sleeping hall, dining room and indoors stock pile (and an office for my book keeper and a hospital too, if I stay for a while) as the burrow 'base camp' and everyone is a member of that. Base camp only extends to the entrance of my camp, and a walled off out doors area used as a refuse pile so that my indoor dwarves can still clean up the place.
Then I mark everywhere outside as a burrow called 'outdoors' and assign my hunters to that burrow as well so they can go get fresh meat. If I use fishermen (I don't on embark, but eventually do) I assign them to this as well if there are lots of random pools, otherwise I create a burrow that reaches only to the lakes/river(sometimes only a small section of it) that they will be allowed to fish at, with a section of the burrow reaching back to the entrance of my camp.
I do a similar thing for wood cutters and planters, I find the parts they'll need to be able to access, make that a burrow while ensuring it links up with the camp burrow. If it's a small embark zone I may just put them into the outdoors burrow, but I generally prefer finer control.
Once my fort is big enough I start to manage my burrows internally too. Instead of one mega-burrow, I'll have 'districts', such as a noble only district, a craftsdwarf only district, a mason only district, etc. The beauty of this is that if I set the input stockpile in my crafts dwarf district to only accept Jet, for example, and my mason district to only accept marble, then I know that when I set up orders to repeat rock crafts and rock blocks, that they will only use jet for the crafts and marble for the blocks/doors/etc. I've gone as far as to have two masons workshops with their own districts, one only making furniture, the other making blocks for my out-side buildings, and having each one use a different stone... I admit I'm very picky when it comes to aesthetics, but I was like this before the 2010 update and back then it was a //real// pain in the backside to get them to make stuff out of the right material. I could rarely leave them on repeat orders for example, I needed to keep a much closer eye on things if I wanted to not waste valuable stones on building supplies.
Theoretically, though I've not done this yet as I've not lasted long enough to need to (unfortunately...) you should be able to set up workshops right next to one another, but just paint the 3x3 of the workshop in the burrow you want, then wherever you have your stockpile for stone (if you use one) make it out of an array of 5 x 5 stockpiles, each one set to store a specific stone. Then when you want a certain stone used for a specific task, you just paint that stockpile with the right burrow and the dwarves should do the rest. I'm not sure if it'll work as the burrows would be disjointed, but I can't see why it wouldn't. Likewise, this would allow you to do the same for metalwork too. Obviously this is more complicated and approaching the level of micromanagement of the old system but while that's true I think the end result is achievable with far fewer button presses than the old way was. And much less hauling into specific custom build storage piles that lie closest to the workshop so you can be sure the next table is made of andersite because your count absolutely adores it.
I hope this has helped illustrate some of the ways burrows can be useful. The stuff about stockpiles is less important but being able to restrict who goes out and where they are allowed to go is /really/ useful and something that's made keeping people safe much easier. Not to mention snatchers now /have/ to come indoors to grab the kids who are wandering on their own. Because they're never allowed in the outside burrows.