That depends on what you think a major problem is.
If you lose one dwarf each year to this. Is that really such a huge problem? How many will you be able to take care of? I personally don't mind large groups of cripples. They add fun to the fortress.
Unless I have a megaconstruction going I have so many idlers at any given time anyway. I have nothing against putting 5 dwarves to bed permanently and having specially designated nurses to care for them as their only choir.
Hell. Once the economy kicks in, I notice the nurses can afford a decent room and everything. The cripples serve a purpose damnit! all hail the hammerer! there's a reason he arrived with the tax collector!
Tbh I just don't really see it, I guess. I blatantly ignore the Nobles' demands (in fact I've never even looked at them). It may be that I don't bother to run a town watch or whatever and I ignore the captain of the guard position, but the hammerer goes around and gives some people a couple stiff whacks and no one really seems to care.
I also don't see the tantrum spiral unless I do something silly (like send the wrestlers in against the enemy bowmen instead of hiding behind traps/walls from said bowmen) and lose a few squads of soldiers, or neglect to check and see if I need to start making plants again because my stockpile of roasts/booze has vanished (since by year 4+ I generally stop spamming out meals/booze and set my farms all to fallow when I notice that I've got 6000 booze and 11000 prepared meals >.> ) and everyone gets sad because they all started starving. . .
So people have a problem with hammerers crippling their dwarves? Does this happen to you if you don't set a captain of the guard or a town watch/royal guard/whatever? Is it more likely to have this occur when you have the economy on as compared to off? I wonder if that is part of it, because I disabled the economy because its current development state is very shoddy with lots of promise to be good later (which is not a slight, this is an
alpha after all, I expect things to be buggy!), maybe the beatings aren't as bad if there's no economy?
Weird. I'm just trying to puzzle out why I see this less often than others, I figure there's got to be some sort of mechanic I am either using or exploiting that is lessening the severity of beatdowns on my dwarves. Otherwise I would at least see it happen
sometimes.
Actually, here's an idea, does the amount of dead/crippled dwarves increase over time? As in do you not start seeing dwarves getting crippled or killed until well after year 10? (The oldest fort I had before achieving a level of boredom at going through the motions with it was 15 years)
Could it be I don't see it because my hammerer hasn't gotten better at his hammer skill?