I think part of the reluctance to let go of simplified/abstracted statistic systems stems from what we would stand to lose, as gamers.
I think that what defines "RPG elements" in a game (whether it be an RPG or not) is the ability to 'play' the system: in your average Final Fantasy, the player has the option of progressing their character towards different play styles and, perhaps eventually, becoming master of them all.
Conversely, a more complex and abstract system like Dwarf Fortress, while interesting and fun, is very difficult to control as a player; there are only a few examples of Dwarves being 'gamed' (Cross-training, Social workouts, Morul), and many of those will be rendered obsolete as DF nears completion.
It's not necessarily the ability to game the system, it's mainly the ability to understand the system. A system in which you have no idea what the statistics spat back at you do is a poor system (which unfortunately is frequent among many console/computer RPGs who've tossed out the meaningful reasons for having statistics.) Most don't bother explaining what statistics actually do beyond a terse 1-2 sentence explanation, and instead make the game easy enough to not encourage you to learn the rules. As a result, most rules in CRPGs that aren't based on tabletop rulesets are stupidly complex when what they actually do is far simpler than what a decent tabletop RPG is capable of - Temple of Elemental Evil, for example, is still one of the deepest RPGs around in terms of mechanics despite being a direct cut-and-paste of D&D 3.5.
And I very much disagree that Dwarf Fortress has few ways to game the system- there are a hell of a lot more ways than that to trick out game mechanics than in most games. In addition to the ones you mentioned, engraving everything for perma-happiness, giving nobles all one large overlapping room, giving one weapon/armorsmith job to every unskilled dwarf to maximize chances of a strange mood getting you a legendary smith, setting dwarves to operate pumps in spare time, the one-tile-wide moat... That's an issue of game balance, which is a smaller focused subset of game mechanics. And the difficulty of balancing the system doesn't diminish in a game with lots of mechanics- it increases. Poorly documenting rules isn't an excuse either, that's just sloppiness (though frequently understandable.)
Having a well-designed game means that the ways of gaming the system are as much fun for all players involved (and that usually comes about through rewarding players the most who play the game as it was intended.)
Most tabletop systems are far more capable of handling a variety of situations than CRPG systems. That's because they have much better-designed rules (for the most part.) CRPGs generally have obtuse mechanics focused around combat that the player doesn't understand well - this means that if the game is to be playable to most players, it won't need the players to understand the mechanics, to do well which means that they're basically useless complexity. Very few model the game world any better as a result of those complex rules (with the exception of Dwarf Fortress), so why the hell are they there when very little more work would get you rules that will result in an easier-to-understand game?
Dwarf Fortress falls victim to this very badly as it is currently - you basically need the wiki to get started as a new player because the mechanics are so poorly described by the game. As an exception to what I'm talking about, the Paper Mario series does a pretty good job on keeping the game mechanics simplified but also diversified and transparent to the player, so they actually understand the decisions they're making.
Ultimately, Dwarf Fortress is really the only game that really needs a computer to be playable to model the systems it needs. The rest use it for graphics and sometimes to make a long list of check marks on a not-quite-completely linear premade scenario, but the rules they have can easily be simplified and lose almost nothing. Tabletop rules generally handle more and handle still handle them better, because if any rule for any game is meant to be meaningful to a player, it needs to be able to be understood by the player first. (That's why I started off the game I'm currently coding with tabletop rules - I wanted players to be able to understand the depth of the game as pain-free as possible.)
Eh... that was something of a tangent, but still connected. The basic notion here is that CRPGs currently require computers because generally their rules are poorly designed and actively worse than good tabletop games, so they do technically use the computer's capacities - it's just hard to make rules that can interact with players meaningfully that are too complex for a tabletop game and not too complex for a computer because a human player must be able to understand the rules that go into the game as well.