I feel like a true DFHack implementation would involve adding those options to the GUI, which is the opposite quantity of work than I want to generate.
Well, they'd show up in the existing list of profiles in the GUI, wouldn't they? I think that's good enough - yeah, making more complicated options would take some work.
The stockpile files I've created since my last post are industry based rather than workshop based, so you can, for example, keep one Quern & stockpile adjacent to your Dyers Workshop and another one next to the Kitchen.
Ah, so those would be somewhat harder to generate programmatically than I was thinking. As long as they're compatible with vanilla, I'm fine with bundling them with DFHack (although it's possible that some mods would break compatibility with them). LNP authors would probably also be willing to include them if you reached out (most of those threads are in the DF General Discussion forum).
I've successfully opened the stockpile files in a text editor, so unless my understanding of what Smultron is capable of doing is deeply outdated, they're text files.
I double-checked a .dfstock file I have laying around from 0.43.05 (it's using protobuf's default format, I think, and I don't think the plugin has changed its format since then). It's a "binary" file in the sense that it has a lot of non-printable and non-ASCII characters, but it also uses ASCII for a lot of stuff. So you'd probably be able to read these files in a text editor and get an idea of what they're doing, but editing them would probably break them. I don't know how Git would handle this exactly, but the (basic) file I have isn't very big, so I'm not too concerned about that anymore.