I wholeheartedly disagree.
If hydras don't actually have multiple heads, how the hell is damage to them supposed to work?
There's a reason why this much detail is being put into the game: It's interesting, and actually affects gameplay in interesting ways.
Also, who cares if most people won't care? Of course they won't; DF is very, very, very much a niche product. You can't expect it to appeal to most people, and there's a good chance it won't in the foreseeable future. Of course, there are things to make it more accessible that could be done, like mucking about with changing the user interface, slightly better graphics support, better documentation, more long-term goals, and further improvements to the game in general, but turning the game's mechanical systems into cookie-cutter "You lost 15 HP! You die!" stuff is the
exact antithesis of why most people stick with this game in the first place.
To me (and a lot of other people), what makes this game great is that Toady is trying to make it extremely complex, and that this is
actually working out.
I'm not saying a more simplistic DF-like game is a terrible idea, or wouldn't work. I'm saying that it simply wouldn't be Dwarf Fortress. It wouldn't satisfy the same niche or appeal to people in the same way at all. The most amazing DF stories that I hear are the ones that involve the more complex and detailed mechanics of the game. Hell, even relatively-mundane things benefit from it, like my jeweler having a bad neck and a missing eye due to a crossbow bolt, as well as a severe head injury that took a long time to heal, still cutting gems and decorating items with them. It's not like it's just fluff, it's actual game mechanics here.
As far as things like material selection at workshops, and military uniforms are concerned, I don't think Toady has ever intended for them to be mandatory. An "any stone" (or selecting just a color, or what have you) selection makes perfect sense and has been mentioned before, for instance, and even if it were mandatory, so what? You just click through the next menu without looking. No big deal having to head a single button once, but you probably won't have to anyway when the time comes.
We can use our minds to fill in the blanks between the graphics, we can use our minds to fill in the blanks between the stones.
This is a non-argument. What you're saying here could easily be applied to any detail in any game, ever.
The reason we're playing a game is so that we don't
have to make everything up: Things happen, according to rules, in an interactive fashion that we can't necessarily predict all the time. That is the essence of a game. If you want to fill in every detail yourself, that's what writing a story yourself is for. If you want things to happen in an organic and interactive manner, you play a game. One of the main draws of DF, as I've mentioned, is the fact that you can do this to a degree of detail that isn't possible in virtually any other game on the market. I mean, haven't you been reading the dev log? Simple things like dwarves being too lazy to attend training on time, or getting attached to their weapons, or whatever other minor behaviorisms are (or will be) added are one of the most endearing things in the game to me, and I think others will agree.
Honestly, when people complain about detail in DF, I feel like they're just complaining about detail that'll bog down actual gameplay. I don't think this is a necessary result of complexity, though.
Of course, they also might be complaining about development time they think is being "wasted", but I'll say this: If it weren't for the amount of detail this game has in it already, it wouldn't
have the kind of dedicated fanbase that it does. The most popular stories, Let's Plays, etc. that have happened probably never would have, and one of its most compelling and important marketing hooks would be vacant.