I still think the player's attachment to the little people is mostly in the player's head. I remember feeling a pang last evening when two of my little old men died, who I remembered as teenagers moving out into their first homes which I had just built for them. That was when the town was only a few dozen large. At 225, I scarcely know the names of anyone. That wouldn't change even if they had dozens of attributes. I confess last names would be helpful in keeping in touch with the families of the originals, but I suspect that Luke doesn't want people looking too closely at the marriage patterns. One of my little teenagers married his Mom after his Dad died. They had one child together before she was too old to have more. I was watching for him to move out and I saw what he did there.
I don't care about attributes as much as I do the little people doing things that make sense. And being able to actually go in and look at a person and see the family arrangements and who their parents were and so one would help in seeing the multi-generational stories going on. Things like that would help, even if the game doesn't track random details like favorite food (although that could help with happiness in this particular game).
Part of the issue is that a lot of stuff is arbitrary. Parents can have two kids at a time, that's it. Why? Why can't they have more? Sure, maybe if food supplies are stretched thin they'd hold off, but when I have twice as much food in my storehouses as needed why can't people have larger families?
And why is it that people can jump from job to job without any effect on the game? It takes
years to master blacksmithing, and an experienced blacksmith should be able to make tools much faster than a novice one. Having your old blacksmith die without a trained apprentice should set you back considerably. As it is you just take some random laborer and tell them to get to work without necessarily seeing any difference. As Zangi says, that makes it a bit harder to care about the individuals because even the game doesn't think they matter any other than a basic age/sex balance of the overall population.