I too have found that making hydrogen is a bit of a ballache in terms of folk wandering up and having away with the water mid-reaction (although that's partly just because, hey, DF); and to divert from another similar point, the maps as-is basically require that you prospect with DFhack beforehand. I'd say about 60% of my embarks have had to be abandoned because there's literally no ferrum-bearing material anywhere on the map. So maybe (independent of the suggested wrought-ferrum changes) either make ferric scrap more common or add some other ore type that gives you iron (admittedly having three types of iron ore might be a bit samey, but then the last time I checked vanilla had at least two)?
There's also a typo/misdescription in one of the item raws; I can't for the life of me remember what it is, but I'll go check. From what I recall, there's some tool that should be listed as a TOOL_TRADE (or whatever it is) but isn't - it's not a big problem cause I'm pretty sure all the reactions refer to it, it's just inconsistent with the rest of its group and thus causes a lot of "bwuh?" if you start messing around with raws.
Re: weapons, I've found that spears seem to be total bollocks, while knuckle dusters are maybe a bit OP - the dorfs with most kills are without exception wearing one or two sets of knucks (sometimes on the same hand, intriguingly) - but in the knuckle dusters case that might be because I'm using them with my homebrew and thus possibly already imba Squats. On the other hand, my Orlock save has a guy who straight-up bit a ripperjack's throat out, so perhaps it's just standard "when the militia gets good they get game-breakingly good" dorfiness. Personally I love the emplaced guns with a faintly wrong passion and amn't all that likely to switch over to 40 for a while, but as someone said, whatever's less work for you.