I see DF as a way to be completely insane, and the UI should not get in the way of my goal.
I know that some people find this or that sort of thing to be overpowered and a guaranteed win-game mechanic. Nothing stops them from ceasing to acknowledge the existence of those mechanics. A whole bunch of people play without cage traps or limit the number of their crossbow dwarves to some proportion they've decided upon. Really, I want to make my own difficulty. It shouldn't be the game's job to do that. Ultimately, I should be able to dictate the majority of my game's parameters, tweak wildlife/goblin frequency, caravan size and so on and so forth. If I want to just lay back and build something neat, I reduce hostiles to minimum and begin my project. If I want to see war, I kick the goblin abilities to the maximum and see how long I can survive. At least - I wish I could do that right now. Right now, I'm in a building mood, so I dig and design a bunch of things and really couldn't care less about fighting invasions.
The thing is that DF isn't played online. If you're cheating, you're only cheating yourself. The end result is meaningless. There's no leaderboard, there's nobody to grief online; hell, even if you do try to screw up a succession game, the succession master will just tell the next player to pick up the previous game and bam, all the trolling efforts are reduced to naught but a little loss of time.
Nothing stops anyone from making the game challenging to whichever degree they desire. That's what the Challenges page on the wiki is for.