I've been working on something, the mod is updated to the most recent version and has had various fixes and additions among which ingame item descriptions and raw comments added to modified vanilla files for clarity's sake. I did get into somewhat of a tangent with dfhack scripting at ranged combat.
The handheld weapon part is pretty much done; I've included gunpowder weapons(handgonne and arquebus, coincidentally), a heavy crossbow and war darts and extended the scripts ability to mod ranged weapon accuracy, hitrate, velocity, damage falloff, weapon/ammo quality actually mattering and a bunch more stuff to the existing weapons. Ranged combat is actually kind of interesting now! I'm still looking into how to get thrown weapons to play nice with worldgen-spawned characters (it doesn't seem to want to spawn ranged weapons that use the throwing skill at all, I think I'll assign spear skill them) but aside from that it's pretty much done.
The last thing I'm hung up on is adapting the fixed artillery as seen in zaporozhets' musket mod. I've been trying to streamline the process of loading and firing a bit, make it not rely on a target being present exactly as the gunner completes the 'fire' reaction AND the gunner not being spooked by the enemy being too close. I...
mostly succeeded but the way I have it now is a little prone to borking when players do crazy things like ordering a bunch of 'fire' commands and then cancelling them again. Once I have that sorted and everything tidied up, I'll get a release out, possible along with a final non-DFhack release for anyone reluctant to adopt DFhack.
Oh and I'll probably have bombards built with a building item that is just a ranged weapon way, way too large for dwarves to use. But you know, if EuchreJack has any elephant men wandering around they could in theory pick them up and be an utter OP nightmare to everything else
After all that, I can get to finally implementing more extensive weapon/armor production and metallurgy (which I presume was what Srip121 was referring to), which will also be requiring DFhack to be remotely feasible. Timeframe on this is 'pretty long' though, since there are no scripts anyone has made that I have found that do all the thing I'd like them to. My current plodding about with the fixed artillery relates to this so if anyone thinks I'm wasting time on that then fret not, it will come of use elsewhere!