I see. Yeah my layout is pretty terrible, I have aspergers pretty bad and i find the current way of designating mining annoying (press enter, drag, press enter, drag, press enter, drag,) so it takes too much effort to like make a hallway with several small rooms attatched. My entrance was to try and make like a hallway that could be sealed off with a drawbridge and I was trying to make a guard tower at the top. hence the ramp and fortifications, i also thought it would help if i had a wall caved out with fortificiations as the marksdwarves barracks, too.
On the subject of weapons, I'm thinking having each Urist in a squad use a different weapon counter-productive, especially since i noticed the fact my hammerdwarf is giving hammer lessons to my sworddwarf and speardwarf and macedwarf probably won't help their weapon skill.
About designating. I JUST noticed you can use the mouse instead, do most players perfer using the mouse, or do they like the keyboard "press, drag, press, drag, press, drag" thing better? I was having problems with it and thats why my fort had alot of one tile wide hallways, especially when i tried to go deep down, How do you perfer digging down? What i did is build a small 1 tile wide hallway, then a downward stairway, then another 1 tile wide, hallway with a downward stairway, etc. Is there an easier way to dig deep down, or am I doing it "correctly"?
For pump training to increase toughness, etc. Didn't Toady explicitly say that atribbutes are no longer tied to skill increases anymore and that a dwarfs atribbutes were "Final" once he migrated into your fort? I remember he said something about that so I thought pump gyms were rendered unpractical unless you wanted to get a bunch of legendary pumpers?