Ok, I'm doing some failing at finding the old dev goals. What specifically is entailed in the Presentation Arc?
It's basically the polish on the interface Toady wanted to do before declaring DF "complete". Of course, the last time "Presentation Arc" was mentioned, Toady responded with a "the arc system is obsolete", making that all moot, anyway.
Myself, I think a good way to do it would be to suggest a DF Talk specifically about Toady looking at the suggestion forums and providing commentary on select threads. That way, we get a nice smattering of topics in the talk based on what Toady happens to read, it draws attention to the suggestion forums as a place Toady frequents (which may or may not cut down on some of the "suggestion thread" stuff in this thread), and it means that Toady would be able to give some of the larger, well thought out threads some of the attention they deserve without just saying "NW_Kohaku has the most well developed ideas, so lets just talk about his stuff". It may so happen that that is true, and that it does form the bulk of the Talk, but "well developed ideas" is more democratic that "NW_Kohaku's well developed ideas"
Think I might go make a post to that effect in the DF Talk Topic Discussion Thread.
As much as I like the idea that it wouldn't then be all about me, as it's kind of embarressing, I think maybe some more open line of communication might be established with what's on the Suggestions Forum and Toady.
I would think that the suggestions forum (and modding forum) could be a place where we might be able to not just throw suggestions, but also try to work on ways to actually assist Toady in improving the game, even without doing something like asking for some sort of back-door to the game for making third-party GUIs or the like.
There are problems with the current military system that are caused largely by the fact that materials and creature bodies are often dummied out - dogs are so useless now because their bite and jaw and other materials are no different from that of any other creature of their size (basically, a child's), even though canine family creatures' capacity to hunt relies upon the ability to take down large prey through their bite. Players could probably be applied to a sort of Ark Project to try to make a less-dummied-out set of raws.
Likewise, the Jiri Petru interface thread had a lot of talk about breaking open the game to have an interface, but as we've been talking about in this thread already, it's entirely possible to make some improvements to the interface without actually doing many drastic changes to the way that the game is coded, but simply by changing the way that information is displayed, and the way that players can move from one screen to another or finding ways to standardize controls to be more intuitive.
If we had some sort of alternate Toady feedback system, especially one that focuses upon encouraging the fanbase to contribute in a way that would actually be productive for the game as a whole, we could probably see more constructive use out of the Suggestions Forum.
Right now, it just seems like a vacuum to scream into, and while yes, we all know Toady is busy and he's behind on reading the suggestions, at the same time, there's no way to know if he's "I'll catch up once a month" behind or "he even tried reading it since .31 came out" behind. It's sort of led to people
dismissing the entire Suggestions Forum entirely, or
treating it as a passive-aggressive joke.
Right now, as with that last link I posted, there are some gripes that are
gripes about the game that
people feel aren't being seriously addressed without some sort of donations scheme to carrot and stick Toady into what they see as priorities. (Plus, I managed to stumble across
this little gem doing searches on interface to see some previous Toady comments on the topic...)
I think getting Toady to provide some sort of guidelines for getting the forum to work in constructive contributions, rather than assuming any attempt to help the game outside of modding is futile would be able to both assist him in making some design decisions and also possibly redirect some of the frustration and demands for things like opening up a backdoor for third party interfaces that Toady clearly doesn't really want to do.
...
Plus, I'm not sure letting Captaintastic express his open opinions on the Suggestions Forum is necessarily going to lead good places. He has been less than patient with posters in the past. (Not that I've been a saint, myself...)