he's also seriously weakened DF standbys: marksdwarves, wardogs and traps.
That was kind of the point...
You shouldn't be able to carpet your entrance in magical solely-enemy-targeting traps, massive amounts of war dogs or marksdwarves behind unbreakable fortifications. It screws up game balance and makes things far to easy.
Yeah, it's an "alpha release" (although I'd claim such labels are weird within the context of DF),
How is a label stating that Dwarf Fortress is nowhere near done weird at all? Go read the dev log, 31 out of 100 cores (core components of the game) are considered 'done' by Toady, and many of those (like fire and the endgame) are still begging to be improved upon (and some, like abandoning, I think Toady has already said he will revisit). Basically, the game is not even 1/3 done, much less in beta and a feature-lock. Just because the average Bland of Bland 14: Bland of the Bland commercial FPS is rushed out the door in a few years, most spent on 'revolutionary graphics', doesn't mean that a game which spends a longer time in development should be considered past alpha and thus bug-free (not that beta implies that, but OT). Personally, I will be very sad the day DF stops getting new features.
I agree that not even Dwarf Fortress is above criticism, and I've leveled a bit of it myself, but from my point of view, the only criticism that the OP offers is 'buggy' and 'too hard' before calling a year (more than? When was 40d released?) of work by Toady an 'insult'. Sure, maybe this release wasn't Army Arc or god mode, but it was a massive effort that added a great platform for expanding the game more easily.
No work is above constructive criticism.
Fixed that for ya. And emphasis.
This essentially sums up the meaning of my entire post.
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Creators never have a completely objective view of their own work, they NEED feedback.
I think almost everybody in this thread agrees with that, could you guys stop beating a magma-incinerated horse? What we're saying is that Toady would prefer CONSTRUCTIVE criticism, not person after person after person saying that the game is now 'horrible', an 'insult to the fans' and 'ruined', step back, and realize that 40d had a year to be fixed, and .31 has been out less than a month.