The best workaround is to have a dumb caste and a smart caste. You can bring some of both at embark; breeding pairs of the dumb caste and a few smart ones for extra muscle. Then the dumb ones can give birth to more workers; give them a one year childhood, or no childhood at all (but then newborn males, being adults, will immediately impregnate their mother/any sisters, making population control next to impossible)
Problem with this is that embark trolls and their lineage are the only ones to have a identifiable history if you go out of your way to edit names for them or detail them in engraved events + history, when they are dead you can't replace them because of historical unit ordering DFhackery wont allow new entries. Ill have to consider the dumb trolls, as it might be easier to buy them with trade without any immediate repercussions for things such as handling goblin fur industries too.
- Sentients born on site to people loosely of your faction are considered your citizens such as newborns dropped by adventurers right? Removing pet tags from smart trolls might possibly shut off association with pets when they are born if that's what Eric is driving towards.
You can import pet_exotics when the correct configuration with [ANIMAL] and
animal always present is uh *present to get faction creatures exclusively or offer them in trade to other races regardless of distance or biome, ill have to poke around it more whether i can apply your method to perfect it.
And before I start a project concerning a very fight-heavy civ, I need a way for them to clear up the areas around thier turf early game and that's stuff I either really have never seen or just flat out didn't notice on the wiki.
You likely need to borrow the excellent dead_dwarf true script out on the modding forum (its a little hard to find, needs to be hall of famed or stored somewhere, i copy paste it to each new DFHackversion i make) that automatically marks things which have died in the duration of it running with some context rules to leave out citizens, then you'd be able to eat, burn, and generally process whatever you like.