Oh well, I HATE when I'm being completely misunderstood.
I'll try to sum up what this thread is for me.
- I love ASCII, I absolutely love to noisy look of characters and colors. In fact I also love the most specifically noisy and esoteric tileset ever produced for DF:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=60176.15- I'd never trade DF 2006 for DF 2014, because I personally prefer much more the simulation aspect to the free sandbox/godmode.
The first chunk of my original post wasn't to explain that DF 2006 was better. When I do an analysis of something I try to make it complete, THEN I add my point of view.
That DF 2006 had a particular charm and game design style that DF 2014 lost is a FACT. Yet it doesn't reflect my preference, it's just analysis.
So why I brought that up? Because past that point DF also fell to the bad kind of "feature creep" (of which the stone colors is just an example).
This post was made with one objective: give Toady arguments to consider how he develops the game, and, now, take time to REFOCUS.
Because, along the years, the feature creep made DF extremely patchy, buggy, filled with systems that only half work, incomplete features and a whole lot of crap signal to noise ratio.
HENCE: please take a break from adding SIGNIFICANT FEATURES, and go back, for an extended period, to POLISH THINGS UP.
Because, imho, DF is now at a point where it's rather badly broken and inconsistent. Not just because of the latest release, but because the MAJORITY of the systems that needed love have been neglected along the years, to add major features.
So, please stop for a while adding major features so that the game can be reorganized into something that *makes sense*, instead of just a mess that is more and more broken as time passes and only becomes just a wacky experiment of computer art.
Can we agree on this?