What I find interesting is everyone asking for various things when he does this for us for free and at the expense of his time.
A little history
All of the functionality people are asking for, there is a fundamental misunderstanding with this:
DFHACK was not primarily intended as a major end user program. Rather, I understand it was originally intended as a background program to allow OTHERS to make major end user programs, aka "Tools." DFHack was the foundation for those tools and still is the foundation for many, (Tweak, Stonesense, etc).
The current situation:
In short, Petrix is the one who enables OTHER to make neat tools. What is increasingly missing now is the OTHER PEOPLE part, other programmers. I don't believe Rick has updated Tweak, the stonesense development team is kind of burned out and most of the other tool making programmers have left the scene. In fact, Petrix has posted saying he might be so nice as to help with updating stonesense too.
Edit: Crap, my tags are screwed up and most of this appears bolded. I apologize for that.
My worry:
Most of our programmers and contributors are overburdened right now, and Petrix is taking on extra duties. This guy does some great stuff for us for really nothing. Let's not ask a whole bunch of him when he's already looking into doing some extra stuff like Stonesense.
Suggestion:
Other than giving this dude a freaking metal, we could consider a casting call for programmers to help with open source code tools and modules for DF. Currently we have Petrix, Deon, Japa, Immortal_Tokel, Nixer, Javathemutt and some others, but frankly I don't even think some of the people listed above have accounts anymore.
Bottom Line
If we as a community want additional features in mods/tools, we might have to think about HOW to get and maintain them, preferably without overburdening our already very nice code contributors.