GoblinCookie, yeah you might need to reinforce some walls and roofs for larger hallways, and make pillars in the larger rooms. I'm still not seeing any "architectural freedom nose-dive" as you put it, just some challenges to overcome.
Maybe fantastical was too strong of a word for a medieval subterranean fortress, since in and of itself it's not, however, the reason they don't exist in real life in the same way that they do in DF is actually much simpler than what you state. Humans need sunlight to produce vitamin D. A human who lived like a DF dwarf would get rickets, in fact, during the ice age, rickets was such a serious problem that it resulted in the evolution of pale skin, sacrificing some UV protection to get more vitamin D from sunlight, and that was just because days were short, nights were long, it was probably quite cloudy, and shelter + fire was warmer than sunlight. Presumably dwarves have some other means of keeping healthy bones.
I have never claimed that dwarves are just short humans. I do not consider dwarves to just be short humans. I'm well aware that dwarven society would be alien (and as I have mentioned, harmful) to humans. Please don't assume that I have made assumptions.
The one time you mentioned anything about dwarven socialising during that entire post was when you claimed this debate was still relevant to it. Nice. Let me list 3 reasons to put it in another thread:
1) People who just want to talk about dwarven socialisation, and have no interest in how ventilation or lighting are implemented, are more likely to not bother reading the thread because they aren't interested in the debate subject at all. This results in less people contributing, and more people making suggestions that have already been made, because they didn't want to check every post to see which ones weren't part of the debate.
2) People who have absolutely no interest in dwarven social lives but are very interested in lighting, ventilation, botanical realism, architectural freedom, the caverns, e.c.t. likely won't see the debate because of the thread name, and won't be able to contribute points that we may have overlooked.
3) Forum organisation. If every debate about subject x was met with a link to a thread about subject x, those debates would be better informed, wouldn't repeat the same points over and over on many different threads, and there would be a huge decrease in related thread derailment.
I'm surprised I had to explain this to you, you seem intelligent enough to be able to figure this out yourself. I'm not trying to avoid the debate, I'll gladly follow you to the new thread and it can continue there, I just want to keep the forum organised and user-friendly.
scourge, yeah I assume there'll be an init option to switch off light and gas simulation, just like temperature.