4. Game feedback - The game won't tell you why the dwarves are not doing what you want. For example, I bought some crossbows from the first caravan. After I equipped them, all my miners stopped digging. The game won't tell me what is wrong. I have to consult the wiki to figure out where I screwed up. I could never figure out how to reequip the mining picks, so I abandoned. In another fort, all my seeds were cooked instead of planted, I couldn't find where to control it. Without the wiki, I would have never guess to look under "Z-Status".
This is interesting. I wonder how it would work. I dont think the game is aware of why something isn't working most of the time.
For those specific examples:
Choosing weapon type turns off mining labor (did you know that?), causing dwarf to drop his pick.
Miner needs to have his weapon set to unarmed and his mining skill re-enabled to get back to work. This is very-un obvious.
Game should at least tell you that it automatically turned off labor. Even better, game should let mining labor turned on and either disable soldiering setting for weapon or just handle weapon pickup and pick drop when miner is activated as you would expect.
As for seccond example, cooking has very bad defaults: Booze cooking is on by default (seriously, booze cooking on by default?) as well as seed cooking. Whioch means that by default, you end up cooking all your booze and seeds when using repeat orders, leading to thirsty/starved dwarves few months later.
Game should have reasonable safe defaults (seeds/booze set NOT to be cookable). Advanced player can then enable it if they need to, but since this setting is disastrous for beginner, it should not be on.
These two example are perfect: reasonable defaults for dangerous things, reasonable warnings for unexpected consequences.
The game doesn't know wahat you want to make happen. The only way it knows you didn't want the seeds cooked is by you turning the "cook (foo) seeds" off in the relevent option.
I'm pretty sure if you play a tutorial or two (there are quite a few around) this issue is answered.
My suggestions is that the "relevant option" to control what items can be cooked is in the wrong place. Instead of being in "Z-status", it should be in the kitchen workshop menu (or accessible from both places). In general, all the related options for some function (like cooking) should be accessible from the same place.
DUH, OF COURSE! This just makes ... sense.
Access animals menu from butchers shop
Access kitchen menu form kitchen
Access stocks menu from office
Access justice menu from jail
Access autolooming option from loom
Access using_dyed_cloth from clothiers shop
Access refuse gathering setting from refuse stockpile
It just ... makes damn sense ... Brilliant.