I'm aware that this has been discussed numerous times over the last few years, but people have mostly been suggesting things like allowing civilians to carry daggers and knives and the like. I think that's a pretty good idea, but it's not really what I'm here to propose, same goes for the threads that proposed a huge overhaul. I couldn't find a thread that was the right one to bump, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to just put my idea out there as its own thread.
All I'm going to suggest is allowing us to equip our Dwarves with "exotic" weapons like bows, whips, scimitars, daggers and blowguns. Production is less important because that's a bit of a can of worms; artifact blowguns won't be as cool after that, plus you've got cultural stuff to think about. I still think we should be able to produce them anyway, but I'm saying that it's complicated. Maybe it could just be the Dwarven preference for the current weapons, and that's what you'd mostly see Dwarves using in AI civilisations, but players would have more of a choice so we could have bowdwarves with daggers in their boots and a whip at their side.
At least allow us to equip the Dwarves with the items, because even if a dagger is less effective than a sword in a straight fight, it's still fun to have daggerdwarf squads. I know some of you are going to say "just edit the raws", but I've heard people say that there's issues involving the hardcoding of soldiers in fortress mode, even to the point that one guy complained that when he modded in humans he couldn't get his soldiers to use the bows they were producing. In any case, I don't think we should be forced to edit the raws for something like this. It just makes sense for our Dwarves to be able to use exotic weaponry in combat.