Uh huh. And what do you think the arch was? The wheel? The lever? Do you call those exploits as well?
...those have what to do with someone saying "don't report an obvious bug"?
Personally I don't think I'll use this, but if people want to, what do you care? It's not difficult to just not use it yourself.
Whether or not someone uses the exploit is not the issue. If you actually read what I posted, the problem is the "no-one report this on the bug tracker" line.
This doesn't appear to be a quirk of the game's (intentional) design that can be taken advantage of(as perpetual motion plants are, for now). It's a bug, plain and simple. It would of course be more meaningful in a multiplayer game with direct competition, and it's not a bug that warrants a high-priority fix. If it had just been put as "I hope Toady doesn't get around to fixing this anytime soon"
that would have been fine. It's certainly one of the more amusing and benign bugs out there - so long as you don't let a dwarf use all of a rare resource , which was kind of the problem in the OP's case; but knowing what causes it allows one to put a stop to it if that happens.
The only problem was in the "don't report it" slant. I've seen that used too often in seriousness to find it remotely funny if it
was a joke.