Here's a practical suggestion I've not seen yet: hot-swappable preference profiles for Dwarves. While it's nice that you can enable or disable any labor for any Dwarf at any time, it would be even nicer if you could automatically set them up to do (or not do) a certain set of labors as needed. This is especially true of brokers, who seem to think that the lowest task on their priority list is trading at the depot (to the point that, even with all labor disabled, they'll still opt to haul items to the depot before they opt to trade!).
The basic idea I have is that every Dwarf has maybe 9 (or at least 3) different setups you can have them use, with a single hotkey press on the Preferences/Labor menu causing the game to load them up to one of their user-saved presets. When you get right down to it, this is basically in intermediate step between fortress-wide orders and individual Dwarf orders.
On that note, I would also love to see the ability to pick a specific job on the Jobs list and assign a given Dwarf that task as their next priority once they're free. To the point that it'd auto-enable any appropriate labors when you do and force them back to that task after any vital ones (Eat/Drink/Sleep) until it got finished or canceled. But I'm sure that has been suggested in some form already.