I believe wooden furniture degrades over time - extremely slowly, but still. A lacquer would be a cool addition for preventing this.
There are plenty of real-world examples of wooden furniture, buildings, and ships that are hundreds of years old--which is far beyond the lifetime of the average fort, and thus hardly worth modeling. Lacquer
would be a flavorful decoration, though.
Modeling sap tree is a good idea, so that we could have lacquerware, maple syrup, rubber and others.
Just FYI, the ratio of harvested maple sap::processed maple syrup is 24::1. So realistically, a full
bucket of sap will yield only a small
vial of syrup. Makes the Beekeeping industry look like a powerhouse of production in comparison.
Meph and Roses are currently prodding DFhack in the hopes of making a way to simulate sapling planting, by summoning a sapling over a workshop then having it automatically dissolve the building after the job is done.
Wow. Now
that is one hell of an awkward, and creative, workaround. Naturally I'd assumed that the most efficient (not to mention intuitive) way would be to edit the raws to make tree nuts & fruits into plantable seeds, but apparently that's not a viable route. As for constructive feedback, I'll say that I don't think dwarves should develop silviculture on their own; that's a technology they should have to get
secondhand, from humans or ideally elves.