Well, I personnally used Masterwork with many additions disabled to benefit from the accelerated features for years (I think?). So of course I would be happy. I'm still twitching when I prepare my embark and open the meat or wood pages... I feel your vision for Revised is exactly what I am looking for in a DF mod.
Thanks for the show of support, and for letting me know your preference! There's definitely a lot of wood in DF. I admit it does trigger my perfectionism to have a dwarf with a pine bed and an oak table. Micromanaging what wood is used in furniture creation and where that furniture goes based on wood type has never exactly been something I'm w illing to do, so I just end up feeling annoyed looking around everyone's rooms.
I've used Modest Mod before Revised, but I never noticed a huge performance boost from Accelerated submodule, and I like my *giant bat leather pants*. I like them a lot. Would it be too much of a hassle to maintain the simplification as "extra", like the wooly dwarves are right now?
I'm sorry in this case, but I'm not sure you'll want to continue using Revised going forward, then! While I'm on the fence about simplifying materials, I've announced many times my intent to integrate Wanderer's simplified and tiered leather, which will do away with giant bat leather pants. There's several tiers of leather with varying strengths: while leather armor is a little silly as far as realism goes (especially stuff like the "tough leather" tier and higher), this provides some badly needed (in my opinion) differences between creatures. Dwarf Fortress provides no real reward for capturing fantastic and difficult creatures: pig leather is as good as anything, and pigs don't even need grass. Providing leather tiers is (to me) a fantastic gameplay addition, and it has the side effect of simplifying leather. There'd be "dragonscale leather pants", "leather pants", "chitin pants", "tough leather pants", etc. Mermaids will have dragonscale, so mermaid farming is back! (Well, theoretically. They're still intelligent. And they'll breathe on land in the next version, so you can't even air drown them. So it's a bad example). I'm already pretty sold on tiered leather, so apologies.
I'm not willing to maintain it as an extra. I'm sorry. I'm already spending almost all of my free time modding Revised lately, and maintaining a second set of files more than doubles the amount of work I have to do. Woolly limbed dwarves is just a difference of a few lines, and is comparatively easy to maintain. Plus, the more extras I provide, the more work I have to do. Any future extra that edits creature_standard needs two versions: one for woolly limbed dwarves, one without. This just gets worse, the more extras I provide.
I spent years maintaing ludicrous amounts of tilesets. For a year or two, I manually updated 64 tilesets for every release of my tileset pack, simply because I was too generous with options. I've finally brought my tileset pack down to a manageable amount of work, I really don't want to do it all over again for the next few years with Revised.
Sorry! Not intending to be rude, just honest. Old versions will continue to be available on the repository, though, you'll just need to update them for new versions yourself. Thank you for being interested, and for posting your preference!
What do you think about fewer gems? A few less stone types?
Would it have any impact on taming and breeding?
Well, taming shouldn't be affected. Breeding would be affected. Almost identical species would be able to form breeding pairs. If you had a giant red squirrel male and a giant gray squirrel female, they could breed and have a child of a random type. The downside, of course, is that if both parents were red squirrels, there'd be a chance that the offspring would be a "gray squirrel". That being said, there aren't all that many creatures that I'd merge this way, so it wouldn't be that common. I consider it a nice compromise between removing species and keeping them in. DF doesn't really need four base species of squirrel (not counting the giant and animal person variations),
In this case, both the gray and red squirrel would be called "squirrel". Their descriptions would indicate the difference. All tags that were previously unique to gray squirrels would be faithfully moved to their castes, and the same with red squirrels. Nothing is really lost, per say. Really, it's just an elaborate way to continue simplifying names: masked lovebirds and peach-faced lovebirds become just "lovebirds". Gray squirrels and red squirrels become just "squirrels". (Although it's worth noting that foxsquirrels and flying squirrels would still be separate creatures).
It's just a thought. It was done in Essential DF, and I like the idea. It might not happen. It makes sense for a few creatures, but not for others. I'm not likely to merge goats and mountain goats, for example.