Will corpses act as containers in this release, or will the dead still drop all their equipment?
Guessing no. They do get appearance/wound info transferred from the creature (although it's unclear whether you can view it), and of course butchering works differently now, but I think that's all there's been for corpse upgrades.
It's #30 on Eternal Suggestion Voting though, in case you hadn't voted for it yet ("Corpses should be containers").
Can we assign ANYTHING, including non-weapons to be a weapon for our military?
Guessing no again. That would be weird enough that he'd have mentioned it.
There's a lot of Assyrian-style stuff in world gen that might get realized during actual play, but there are also a lot of things that are not going in.
Assyrian-style?
The Assyrians had a reputation for being mean. The worldgen thing where people get flayed and their skin nailed to a tree or whatever is straight out of their repertoire. That said, I doubt any of that was unique to them -- I think they got focused on because they were longstanding enemies of the people who wrote the Old Testament. Threetoe knows much more about this stuff, I think.
Here's something I came across while reading about the practice of flaying. Apparently the "gruesome sculptures" in worldgen have historical precedent, but they also start to stink after a while, so they packed the rotting skins in containers to keep the odor sealed up.