I come back here after some months, and I still find the new evolutions of your tileset rather appealing.
I also made the drastic change depicted below, but there's no way I'm going to make it the default.
In the one-shots folder is this "dwarf letters" variant. I haven't seen this idea come up before, which surprises me. I've grown to quite like it in the several hours I've spent with it, but I'm aware it's a controversial change so it's in the one-shots folder. Be sure to turn off graphics if you use this, for obvious reasons. Rationale follows:
The only reason I made racial graphics to begin with was the visual disparity between dwarves, humans, elves, goblins, and kobolds. Despite the focus on dwarves, Tarn and Zach have always maintained that the game is/will be a "fantasy world generator", not just a "dwarf game". I've always liked the other DF races as much as the dwarves, and the visual disparity bothered me. The racial graphics are an imperfect idea due to vanilla bugs and my oddly limited choice of race. (Why kobolds and not gremlins? Trolls? Animal people?) TWBT is an option, but I often play without DFHack and I can only do so much with 10x10 to differentiate races anyways. This is my offered alternate solution, and I rather like it.
In the beginning I was dubious seeing this picture. But your explanation of why you did represent dwarves by "d" is actually very convincing. I never thought of the races that way, and I must admit that this double ledged "d" is in fact great to look at (particularly in the second iteration).
Although I do not post here often, let me tell you that each time I re-enter one of my "Dwarf Fortress periods", the first thing I do after having downloaded the game is to update it with your tileset. Well I must say that last time I lengthily hesitated with AutoReiv's tileset, but I found it too squared. Maybe I'll give it a try in the future.
As always, comments and criticism are welcome. Screenshots are especially welcome, but I rarely get those.
Here you got one. In a cavern, a bunch of unarmed dwarves are punching a giant olm (the blue exclamation point) as hard as they can. The poor beast is undergoing a permanent unconscious state, even if the dwarves barely scratch it. In the meantime I am trying to seal a part the the cavern, but of course the olm keeps scarying dwarves who come build the wall, allowing more dangerous creatures to wander around...
However I dislike the new brown, it is too close of a green-gray in my opinion. For example look at this designation (old versus new) :