Editing speed is probably the biggest (and by biggest I mean most clearly effective, and therefore clearly unfair) cheat you could possibly mod, and I think it's one you should -strongly- consider doing in this case, if time is the issue. Just a warning if you aren't THAT big on cheating, it's also next to impossible to play Dwarf Fortress with regular, unmodded dwarves after having experienced the joy of a fortress full of dwarves on crack, and I for one simply don't have the kind of time in my day to sit there waiting around for the dwarves just to get from Point A to Point B. It's even easier in 40d to figure out how, too, since the speed tag is already in there (unlike in 2010 where I kept trying to figure out whether just adding [SPEED:0] would work). Seriously, you'll crap your pants at how fast they move, it's borderline teleportation if your frame rate is good. Also, never go up against a speed-modded dwarf, they can outrun and out-attack anything.
I don't know how to give you more dwarves, but I -do- know how to get you unlimited embark points, the only thing is it involves using Cheat Engine, which is a third-party program. It's fairly simple to use once you get the hang of it, you just basically find Dwarf Fortress on the program list (you should have Dwarf Fortress open to the "plan carefully" screen), set it to 4 bytes, type in your embark points, then buy or sell something to change your embark points to a different number, and then plug the NEW number into Cheat Engine and have it do a second search (NOT a new search), it should pop up with one or two data addresses, one of those should be the address for your embark points. Double-click that number, set it to something nice (preferably higher than 300 if you want one of those fancy steel anvils, not that it makes much difference), and then set it to freeze address, and no matter what you do, assuming anything you purchase is below that amount that you plugged in for the number, it'll always bounce back to the exact same number the second after you raise or lower it.
By the way, the same exact thing can be used to edit the Dwarves' starting skill points so that they can get to proficient in whatever skills you want them to be without having to decide between them. Be sure to edit your embark points first.