Limping in a day late and a dollar short, as I don't have time to read all 80 pages of this thread, but I'll give my feedback anyway.
For me the ASCII was a bit of a problem, mostly because DF was my first game with that sort of interface style. I was able to work through it, but I still prefer to use graphics packs. It's not really the looks that are the issue, but it adds another layer of complexity to an already overwhelming game. I realize that this is being looked at as part of the presentation arc, so I won't harp on it too much, but I do think that it would be a good idea to prepackage an official version with a tileset of Toady's choosing or design. Ideally it would be something like Crawl does, with a ASCII exe and a tiles exe. This wouldn't take a lot of Toady's time, as I'm sure that most graphics makers would be thrilled to have their work included, and would yield significant increases to the incoming player base.
Another thing that turned me off was the complexity of setting up your game options in general. Most people are unwilling to reach into the game folders, crack open a text file, and start swapping values. Even a simple "Setup" main menu option that opens the init.txt file over DF would be a significant improvement, but a proper ingame menu would be optimal. I think that the d17 version is going to do a lot to help this as well.
Another thing that I would like to see is more mouse use. The mouse input code is already in the game as part of the designation tool, but I would like to see the mouse used on the main map as well, to select tiles for the k and v views as well. This could be a step towards adding a mouse driven menu system, which really ought to be part of the game already. I don't imagine that it would be significantly difficult to define boxes over the current menu, so that you can click to select the options. Combining these two to allow you to define activity areas, constructions, and place workshops with the mouse would make the game more accessible to the people still starting out, while still keeping the speed of keyboard shortcuts for advanced users.
Also, while this wasn't much of a problem for me personally, many people can be put off by the sheer complexity of starting your first few fortresses. Genning a world, picking your site, picking your starting gear all become easier once you know what you are doing, but in the beginning, it's pretty easy to screw yourself over. A simple play-through tutorial scenario would be a great help to get people into the game. It'd be difficult to do this with the (hopefully) frequent version updates, but I think it could be done if you made it sufficiently broad in scope. Ideally, I'd like to see some/all of the youtube tutorial topics translated into in-game scenarios, but that would probably have to be a dev item of its own.
There are a number of things that I would like to see content-wise, like balancing and various features, but the dev list covers much of it. I think that the points above would significantly increase player retention and help expand the DF playerbase, with minimal development time committed. This would bring more cash in, and make it more likely that we will see V1.0 at some point.