tldr: I kinda posted this into the wrong thread. only now i can't QUIT recall which thread this was meant for.
lets see.
Currently: I get rid of unwanted stone by running craft stations on repeat, thus cleaning up my fort over time...
even though I've changed my playstyle so that i DON"T actually NEED to clean it up for stockpiles-seriously. I embrace the cluttered workshop just to prevent my dwarves from hauling insanely-heavy statues all over the place. What doesn't make sense is that i have to use CRAFTS to clean up "rubble". Well, maybe it does make sense in a twisted, dwarfy way, but...
hm...
ahah!
stone, rubble, and dust. stone is stone, rubble slows you down a lot, dust is potentially dangerous.
Three flavors of mining: quarry, fast mine, and pulverize. (this has been suggested before to some extent, but...)
Quarrying is extremely slow, but never gives rubble, and almost never kicks up dust.
Standard mining may drop stone, or it could drop rubble, and it can also make dust. mostly, this should be based on the mining skill.
Pulverize will *occasionally* drop rubble or stone, with a constant 5% chance of dropping stone, but mostly it kicks up dust, which can be very bad for your miners if you use this too much. Actually, it kicks up LOTS of dust. More skilled miners will do a better job of pulverizing the rock into infinitesimal pieces so that they can use the axiom of choice to annihilate it completely, producing less dust. (yeah. it's usually used to turn a sphere into two spheres, but it can be run in reverse; it only works on continuous objects.)
In the event you *want* to do something with rubble, order some masons to crush rocks into rubble.
Rubble will slow down any job that's too close, and will slow down anyone walking over it. too much total rubble in a layer will tend to slow you down.
Rubble that has been placed in a floor may be called gravel, and will cease to act as semi-global clutter. (bonus points for making gravel cause cave-ins via the old system...or maybe even make it act like minecraft gravel, and fall down, period. )
Dust is a lot like miasma in spread behavior, and vanishes pretty quickly on reaching open sky. Dwarves won't complain about it anywhere near as much (as long as you don't make a dwarf who hates dust be your miner), but it can kill them if they breath it constantly for too long-something between a season and 5 years should do.
Dirt cooperates a bit too well with efforts to eliminate it, and so vanishes when either "mined" or "pulverized" and will almost never create dust.
The masonry shop can be instructed to pulverize rubble, taking a bit longer than a miner, but producing a lot less dust.
Craftsdwarves may attempt to make something out of rubble, but they have no guarantee of success and may produce some dust in the process.