Excellent! I hope this brings the game towards a more friendly, less unforgiving gameplay, that, as undwarfy as it might sound, could actually help to drawn more people into the game.
Now only rest to have the manager keeping stocks of certain things at certain levels and being able to set the material employed for furniture/crafts (ie specific woods or stones) directly on the workshops without needing stockpile tricks! That would make life far more easier to a lot of us.
Toady, this changes with the hauling and all that sounds like something serious, will it be savegame compatible? I'm kind of in the middle of a huge fort (450+ seats dining room with granite pillars) but also would love to have the new features you have implemeted.Will wall/road building jobs ever go back to having skills associatted with them (that actually influence in the quality/ speed of the job)? I mean, it does make sense to have your guys need some skill in masonry if they want to build a stone wall... it's not exactly unskilled labor like hauling.
My guess is that masonry is still influential for the speed of everything and the quality when applicable (roads for example), only that just as hauling, now its a separated labor masonry for crafting things as furniture and for building things like walls, that's it, if you want to only your masons to build things then disable "build constructions" from everyone else. On the contrary if you don't want your legendary mason to be bothered building a wall then you disable the labor for him and let anyone else do it.
That way you get to decide who is actually going to be constructing stuff. Just like deconstruction works right now, with the only difference being that the masonry skill might still be important to the speed/quality of the job.