In the absence of understanding why something happens, those things are just stuff that happens, not a real story.
With respect to things like physics, operation of mechanisms, etc, I totally agree.
What I'm mainly saying is, I don't want dwarves themselves to be easily understood/predictable. This would remove all of what I consider to be the flavor of the game.
Compare this to the problems that players have with doctors not bothering to get their patients water, and having every injured dwarf die of thirst: Very, very few players know that personality traits play a role in this, and there is almost no hint in-game that these things are related. Most players are just declaring "doctors are broken!" and reporting it as a bug.
Like here, these players must consider their dwarves to be automatons, which was immediately clear to me as not the case. Plus, I actually didn't know if personality traits had a large effect on dwarven behavior in the hospital, but if I have a dwarf who likes helping others available as chief medic, I will seek them out and give them that job just because it makes sense to do so. Even if it didn't matter, I would still do this, just because I imagine they would be the first person to take on the job. I keep logs of my forts and write my dwarves as characters, and I try to tie their personality profiles in with what they do.
But then again later in the life of the fortress, there's more structure and assignment rather than choice of labor. So when it comes to anyone but the chief medic, I assign anyone with notable skills in the field as a nurse (often not as their primary role), regardless of their profile... and I love it when they do a terrible job. It just brings flavor to the game.
(And there are plenty of other things that are beyond player control that almost certainly are bugs that prevent most medicine from working, at that, such as a crutches.)
But here, again, I agree with you, because it's something that literally does not work.
And just to reiterate and underline my point, it's because the difference in what the player can actually see and understand about the game because of what the game is actually willing to tell the player - the player needs to understand what action caused what consequence in order to learn.
So long as dwarves don't become automatons, which they are. They exist in code, so they're subject to specific conditionals and such, but so long as we don't understand them, they continue to appear as organic and independent little creatures going about their lives and we're free to laugh at and interpret their strange behaviors however we please. When I understand that "is prone to fits of anger" means they will tantrum at 75 points of anger, which amounts to exactly one dead child and a miasma... that aspect of the game is just gone.
And I don't want to create any divides here. This is just a really interesting subject to me. I think it says something that (I assume) we both love this game, despite having opposite perspectives on this. Leaving our understanding of creature behavior fuzzy strikes the perfect balance that leaves plenty of room in the game for both of us.