I'd enjoy joining this, but I've got a few questions.
Are we starting pre-embark with guidance on where to embark, so we all get to pick our own starting supplies and skills, even our own names for our fortresses, but make sure to end up in the identically placed and sized location for our forts?
When you say competition in the post name, and 'compare progress' in the body of the post, which are you leaning towards? 'Freeflowing stories and details/differences compared' more, or 'here's a list of goals, now race towards them'?
You didn't specify vanilla DF or any of the many mods, so I am guessing that you're thinking vanilla DF for this? (not that I'm opposed to mods, myself)
As to your preferences, I'm perfectly happy to have no aquifer (or a mixed biome including an aquifer-less mountain or something as well as areas with aquifer), and I like access to some sort of metal just fine
If you're hoping for newish players join this, you might want to lean away from starting on an evil place... some of those are darn challenging. I assume you've read of vile syndrome bearing rains and endlessly reanimating undead... That said though, for all I suspect it will lessen the number of less experienced players who join us and might stop many of us cold who start, if you want evil for this (at least for our first (few?) attempts to get this off the ground, I'm game. But I'm game for something a little less likely to be a bad starting hand too. And it's true that not ALL evil places are luck and a sprint underground that's likely to fail or there go all the starting seven.