Apologies for the late feedback, I don't check the forums all that often at the moment...
With DT and a low population cap fort I was able to keep stress under control. It's still a troublesome mechanic though. My embark is a mountain jungle with continuous year-round rain. Is it worth letting dwarves go out to chop wood, harvest fruit, or haul zombite (the undead form of goblinite)? Probably not. Everyone already has some bad thoughts about rain from when they migrated (there might be a couple of toddlers who have never been rained on, not sure), but why give them more. I'd suggest some sort of forgetting time for stressful events, such that a dwarf will forget being rained on very quickly but remember serious stress for many years, and will never forget the most seriously stressful events.
The other stress-related annoyance was the impossible food preferences. Of the 30 dwarves in the fort as of when I put it on hold this summer, only one had a satisfiable food preference. They like perry, there are lots of pear trees on the surface, and in principle I could harvest some, brew it, booze-cook it, and hope that someday that particular dwarf would eat from that stack of meals. Everyone else liked some combination of meats from animals not present on the embark (usually fish of various kinds) and booze from surface plants not present on the embark. So I had to give up on even attempting to satisfy food needs. It would be nice if food needs could be biased toward foods that are actually available within the home civilization, so that at least the annual caravan can help out, and unless the embark is unusually distant there'd be a decent chance of some being in the embark.
Not game-ending problems by any means, but they do negatively impact the game, and I think I play a more cautious, turtling, micromanaging style than most. Not to mention relying heavily on DT and editing the population cap to keep a fairly small and manageable fort.