2922, I remind you again, is Not a Bug.
And I'll remind you that he already responded to you on that point:
And #2922 is not, in fact, a bug.
It is open on the bugtracker + IMHO it is a bug.
Not to mention the fact that it already has three votes.
So 3 people thinking something is a bug and Toady not having the time to close an obvious non-bug report (instead of, say, working on bugfixes) make something a bug? The population cap operates in a predictable way that also makes sense in-universe. You can argue that there should be an alternate hard cap if you want, sure, but there really isn't any water behind "I don't understand/like how this mechanic works, so I'll call it a bug!".
Unrelated: Still the stagnancy spread, so much. Zombies close behind that.
You can set the maximum population of your fortress here. Keep in mind that your population must be at least 80 to get a king and 100 to obtain the current game features.
[POPULATION_CAP:100]
"maximum population of your fortress" not "maximal population after last visit of surviving caravan that will qualify you to unlimited migrant wave"
Thing is, it's talking about your maximum population as observed by your civilization. In other words, the liason visits, leaves, and reports back "Hey, guys, they're at 53 dwarves, and they don't want any more than 60. Y'all are free to migrate on over!". Actually, I find it rather dwarfy for them to (in essence) assume that a large chunk of your population will probably die before the next visit, but that is a whole 'nother topic.
I guess where I'm coming from is that
1. It isn't a bug, it's a feature (and for once, not in a joking way).
2. There is readily identifiable behavior.
3. It is fairly simple to get it to do what you want.
I take the same view on things like this as I do on, say, getting Aurora to a playable resolution, in that while it is a bit frustrating if you have no idea what you're doing, the "problem" as such is solvable with about ten seconds of work (or however long it takes you to open up the init file and change to popcap to something ~20 below your desired population), and yet people insist on complaining about it and demanding that it be changed, when work on practically
anything else would be a much bigger improvement to the game.
As a related note, there are plenty of other mechanics that are imprecise and often lead to undesireable results (and which also have fairly simple workarounds), such as dwarves preferring to build walls from North and West, yet I don't see any of those up there.