I had this architectural whim I wanted to indulge, so I cheated. Shamelessly. Embarked with seven miners and a ton of food and booze, spent like three hours designating painstakingly, dfhacked "fastdwarf 1" to make them dig like the wind, and hollowed out my whole fort in the first month of the first season. Once the digging was done, I mass-autodumped all the stone — 9,000 boulders — into one tile, turned off the fastdwarf hack, and actually started to play.
It's autumn now, with a population of 15 so far, and it's going great. I'm really happy with the fort. But just one thing … man it's empty. I carved out these huge halls, including a meeting area just east of the crafting district that my dorfs could play a soccer match in, and I've got fifteen dwarves living there, mostly just … waiting. There's no bustle, no conversation. The vast halls and deserted side-streets echo with the occasional slap of a llama-wool shoe or the clatter of a dropped tool at the mason's shop — the only one that's active at the moment — and that's it. It's deserted.
It's got a great feel. Maybe sometime in the future I'll use the same trick but carve out a truly vast fort, only cap the population at 20 or something so it keeps that emptiness.
Maybe this says more about my mood and personal state of mind today than anything, I dunno.