I personally do make a dining room, but I use a meeting zone rather than designating from a table. The meeting zone gives a place for dwarves and animals to congregate (it's important for getting immigrants to haul ass inside), but it eliminates parties which are where most of the socialization happens. Most my dwarves still just hang out in their bed cubicles (which are doorless slots 3-4 tiles long). They still socialize a bit, and make friends a bit. It works well with my style where I have everyone except miners in the army (at least as inactive marksdwarves), every siege a few dwarves die and it helps keep them hardened up. Quality doesn't truly matter for anything so if a legendary whatever dies, sure, it sucks a bit, but a few immigrants or grown-up peasants can replace the loss. Like in my latest game I lost my legendary miner, and his secondary miner, in an accident involving a cave-in and a magma pipe (they became magmanauts, or whatever you call dwarves who dive to see the bottom of the magma sea), bad? No, it's good. I replaced them with 5 just-matured peasants, who I trained up mining some dirt, they're a bit slower, but getting rid of a legendary actually hardens the fortress against tantrum spirals (and besides, what else are the new generation going to do if you don't off the old?)
One of the things which gets players into trouble is trying to make a uptopia where everyone is happy and no-one ever dies, the goal should be fortress where life is reasonably good but not too good, in fact one way of looking at it is, if attrition to war and accidents isn't outpacing immigration, and your fortress isn't collapsing into a tantrum spiral, then it's a good fortress even if it's something of a dystopia. Tantrum spirals are essentially what you get when you've had too much happiness for too long (dwarves who are treated like dirt, but have food, drink and a bedroom, will rarely tantrum, it's spoiled dwarves who like to go off their rocker), death is good, and immigration is good, because it keeps breaking up the social web, preventing a "critical mass" of relationships from accumulating. And dwarves who have to see and deal death, are much hardier than pampered dwarves hence a good policy is: everyone fights, and everyone has a chance of dying.