I tend to pick this game up every year or so, play a bit and put it down. I never get particularly good at it, but on the flip side, I see it from the perspective of a newbie each time, rather than a pro :p
Firstly, of course, it's a great game (you don't need me to tell you that). It offers a very unique experience (still).
But there are gripes. Niggles. Things which ultimately stop me playing.
#Firstly, and this may simply be my ancient hardware: every fort tends towards FPS death by year 5. I'm not sure why. Too many stockpiles? Too many animals? Too many zones? Or just too much morerer. Either way, by year 5 we're crawling along.
#Second, also by year five I'm literally snowed under with micromanagement. Is this the essence of DF? Are we supposed to have to micromanage every, little thing? Clothing is a particular bugbear of mine (and probably doesn't help the FPS!). So much clothing literally everywhere. There doesn't appear to be a way to distinguish worn/faded clothing from freshly made stuff, which doesn't help.
Things that have to be micromanaged: Stones (dump, dump, dump). Garbage dumps (let's take this stone from the surface to the dump in the caverns, hey ho!). Seeds. Bags. Seeds in bags. Hauling duties (miners would rather haul than mine). Dwarf happiness (item acquisition; prayer; thoughts in general). Animal training (seeds stuck in cage traps grrr). Food production (or stuff just rots). Clothing (argh!). The military (boy, oh boy).
I don't want to sound like I hate the game, but micromanagement eats time and burns the player out before they even get to the fun stuff.
#3 The military, esp time to setup and effectiveness.
(My most recent fort ended with a FB eating everyone. Actually, I banished the werepanther before the fort's collapse, so he could spread chaos in the outside world. For the rest of the dwarves I simply watched the slaughter, laughing grimly. Because by that point the micromanagement had eaten away at me so much I hated almost every one of them. They deserved it. Especially for the clothes littering.)
a) Copper is useless. If your fort has only copper you may as well restart. Copper doesn't seem to protect from, nor harm, any serious threat (like a FB). Looking in the combat log I was a tad depressed to see all the military dying in one hit (bite or scratch -> head flies off in an arc!). Maybe this FB was particularly impressively massive or strong, but one-hit kills were the order of the day, in full copper uniform.
b) Training "Armour User" is nearly impossible. I don't even think I need to expand on this, do I? Unless I'm doing something seriously wrong, none of my forts have ever had a military with Armour User above Adequate or something useless. Even when Weapon/Shield is at legendary (especially then, because in sparring everything is then blocked/parried). Dodge is similarly difficult to improve.
#4 The military UI. Seriously, the equip screen. How many times I look at dwarves allocated a full kit. Then, on inspecting the dwarves themselves, see they are missing half their items. Sometimes the items allocated are inaccessible. Sometimes the dwarf just has this insane urge to be a wrestler, and to hell with weapons and armour. Those ones don't live long. But the game doesn't tell me they are carrying or not. Just that they are allocated. So I have to look at each one and resolve individually why they don't have what they should.
#5 Burrows. The spam from dwarves that are placed in a burrow (for their own protection) and still have some hauling or labours enabled. I don't want to turn them all off, but that means living with "item inaccessible" or "drop off inaccessible" spam for the whole game. It would be so nice if stockpiles could respect burrows, and didn't continually want items the dwarves can't get to.
Sadly, burrows in general tend to break the game if you use them a lot. A particularly nasty consequence is a dwarf in a burrow repeatedly cancelling a vital task, meaning a non-burrowed dwarf (who could do it) never gets the chance, and the task itself is then unable to be completed. Not great when that task is "bring water" to your hospitalised dwarfs (a bunch of whom then die of thirst :p)
So, that's that for now. I'll pick up DF on Steam when it's out and continue to enjoy the game sporadically.
The thing with DF is that I tend to know what I want to do with it. But instead, the fort has its own ideas of what it wants from me. It wants a micromanager :p
But I can only micromanage for so long before it just wears me down, and I wonder (genuinely) why I'm putting so much effort in, just to see the dwarves inevitably plummet into depression, run around naked, refuse to arm themselves, and then get eaten. Sure they made a bunch of useless artefacts, and my nobles had me place Armour Stands in literally ever corner of every room. But that really wasn't what I wanted to do, that was what the fort made me do.