I have to disagree with you regarding burrows, Kneenibble. I've tried to use a disjoint civilian burrow (probably 0.40.19)) to keep a miner inside a mountain while the rest of the dwarves were in the other part, inside the fortress. The bugger was hell bent on going to the fortress anyway and climbed out on wall of the inside of the volcano cone (which obviously was NOT in the burrows). Similarly, I had recently no problems sending dwarves out on top of the roof of my orchard to build a platform to shoot down a titan camping 12 levels above the ground. This, again, was achieved by extending the existing civilian alert burrow to cover the construction area (well, I suffered from some strange forbidden area cancellation until I extended the burrow area to include two tiles of air around the 7 tiles of roof involved (1 to build a staircase, 6 to stand on, that shouldn't be needed at all, since the buggers happily and frequently stand outside the burrow to work on a tile inside otherwise).
The dropping everything on the activation of a civilian alert burrow is also not completely correct. Builders hauling blocks and boulders to sites outside the alert will hobble towards safety hugging their precious boulders to save them while the FB bears down on them. To stop that from happening you have to first cancel the construction job and then activate the civilian alert (adding a dorf hauling something to a "normal" burrow typically results in the dorf issuing an endless cancellation spam about either a forbidden target or no path to the target [don't remember which] until you give up and release him from the burrow, since he won't drop what he's carrying).
Drafting of the monarch: Yes, just I checked again, and I was wrong! My king CAN be added as the second member of a squad, but not the first one. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!