I tend to use stone crafts for the pointy-eared bastards elf merchants. I don't buy anything from them but exotic animals, anyway, so a couple dozen stone crafts are usually sufficient to purchase what I need.
For everything else, there's spiked wood balls.
Picksling's civilians are now clad in steel. All fifteen dwarves whose occupations don't require a uniform are wearing steel helms, breastplates, gauntlets, greaves, and high boots. Now I'll only have to make clothing for the remaining four miners/woodcutters. Should save on cloth and leather substantially.
I've been keeping the catsplosion in check, but one of my miners (who arrived with the first migrant wave) loves cats and has already accumulated six furry shadows. He's not disposable, being a Legendary+5 Miner and one of only two dwarves I have on hand to do major amounts of digging, but it is annoying to have to keep butchering large numbers of kittens that his pets crank out.
The giant tigers are breeding well and their cubs will make the family grow exponentially as soon as they're sexually mature. I'll have some currently unspecialized dwarf learn animal training by training them all for war. Once I have the magma pump stack finished, the forgotten beast trap completed with obsidianizing capabilities, the first and second cavern levels equipped with traps, and a set of magma forges fully active, I may finally raise the population cap. On the other hand, working with only 19 little bearded alcoholics makes me value each dwarf much more, and since none have yet died, I've grown rather fond of each of them. I'm not getting sieges, ambushes, or even megabeasts, so things are quite calm besides the Forgotten Beast attacks - that's the main issue.
It would be nice to be able to lower the population requirements for various invaders, but I think that's hard-coded.