I liked this one too. Two especially interesting things came up: leaders "visibly" weighing decisions, and storing knowledge at the civ level as a baseline for less significant individuals.
The first one is a really important concept, not just in worldgen, and not just for decisions like whether to go to war. DF is increasingly moving toward subtle mechanics -- systems that interact in cool ways that evoke our instinctive understand of the world. We've already seen the beginnings of this in various personality/relationship/mood mechanics, like dwarves developing grudges when their personalities are incompatible (that's how it works, right?) and then getting angry when forced to hang out together. However, ultimately these mechanics are wasted unless they're presented to the player in some fashion.
Obviously there are good and bad ways to present them -- you don't want to be like "Hey player, check out these awesome die rolls!", and conversely you shouldn't force the player to root through personality screens to deduce these interactions (it's not only uncompelling, but also really artificial, when you get down to it). Ideally they would be presented by characters in the game world, such as a historian discussing a leader's motivations in text (or in person), or a dwarf visibly complaining to a friend about a specific social situation. In situations involving shy or secretive individuals, it's reasonable that the player should have to make some deductions.
The second idea, storing knowledge at the civ level, seems like a really promising approach. (Yes, I'm harping on the knowledge system again.) Obviously you'd want to store some knowledge at a local level too, and maybe for entities in general, since guilds, cults, etc. could definitely have some special knowledge. From there, once the game decides that a person needs to be individualized, it can use their entity membership, personality, occupation, etc. to determine how much they should know about things.
I had actually been considering posting suggestions on both of these topics, but it sounds like Toady's already done more thinking about it than I have.
Ah, yes. Even though it's kind of just saying "me too", I'd also like to have an option to have the Dwarf mode go at the "real time" speeds, I'm often a little miffed about games having all kinds of speedups for the passage of time, at least excessive ones... I mean, I might go for time acceleration of two or four times, but doing 20-50 times the speed of normal is a bit fast... 
Yeah, putting timescales in init has come up a couple times. I'd really like that option too -- I personally don't
like seasons going by so fast, it feels ridiculous.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress Talk #4: Feedback (Read 38605 times)