I just thought about this. If you're going for a butcher thing, super huge animals that take forever to fully mature would be great right now. Since the babies never grow in size, waiting the 5 or more years some creatures require till they become an adult is not necessary to maximize your returns. So, slaughtering a new born isn't only fun for the family, it's efficient.
I guess I'll slaughter all those bears I've been breeding. Major letdown there. Perhaps I should just train the bears I buy and keep the midget baby bears for non-fighting tasks. At least the 'war' tag will help me keep them sorted. I am also seriously considering altering raws to make my fortress population migrant only with *NO* children. The seething waves of useless migrant children are a bane.
Even if pickaxes are decent for native military dwarves, they still need to multigrasp and can't weild shields too, except in the luckier cases.
Kitting out miners in armor seems like an interesting idea though. I've lost several to strange injuries when channeling away up/down staircases in groups of 3-4. Armor might go a long way to preventing this from happening. It's also had severe implications on my hunt for the perfect death trap, but that's something I knew already. Armored goblins were surving long falls with only moderate injuries.
You can wield multi-grasp weapons single handed, it just gives them a lower hit chance. Which you'll probably hardly notice. And as Sutremaine said, you can't armor up miner Dwarfs cause of a hard coded miner/woodcutter/hunter uniform. There was a work around to it found
here. I tried fiddling with it last week, but it kicked my ass.
Has there been any word about this issue from Toady? Was this discussed in DFtalk?
I'm downloading the new DFtalk to see. If he did, and I'm the first to report back, I'll tell ya what was said about it.