Well, after being away for several months, I see this thread got a brief spark of attention before dying back down.
Two I want to focus on.
I'd really like my dwarves to do more stuff by themselves, be more self-sustained. However, I'd really NOT like it to be hooked up with the economy, since as of now it's a horrible, horrible thing (in my opinion). What I would like to see would be, for example, dwarves brewing plump helmets while keeping in mind that there must be a certain number of them left in their raw form, so that I don't have to control my brewing industry manually all the time; at the same time, dwarves making just enough barrels to suit the needs of the breweries; I would like breweries to start up if the brew stockpiles run dry, etc. Like the current fishery/butchery/tanning systems, and similarly to them, with a trigger enabling or disabling this. That way, I would've been able to bring many control buttons together and wire them to a single one. Same with designating stuff to be moved to the depot: having an option to designate a certain good or a type of goods to be automaticaly moved to the depot when a caravan arrives. Maybe I will edit more ideas in later.
Now that would be a way of reducing micromanagement that I'd like.
This gives a pretty good example of the sort of balance between positives and negatives that a player can see in the idea.
Also:
To be honest, I somewhat prefer the great degree of micromanagement.
I could go into a long explanation as to why but I need to go to bed now.
So I'll just add one reason instead of several.
Just think for a moment, of what dwarves do stupidly. Build from the wrong side of the wall and trap themselves in hell. Strand themselves on constructions. Drink booze while on fire, or not even notice they are on fire. Have strange moods. Bonesetters who cannot find buckets. Dwarves who can't pick up the soap without dropping in repeatedly in a spam of job cancellations. Using crossbows as melee weapons. Going on a break while the goblins seige. Deconstruct a floor while another dwarf is still standing upon it. The list can go on forever. Do you REALLY want these guys to start doing more things without you knowing about it at first?
A good example of the distrust of the things that can possibly go wrong with greater autonomy.
The trick is, obviously, working out ways to nullify or mitigate the bad while reaping as much of the good as possible.
For starters, a lot of the problem is that "dwarves are stupid", which is a problem that would need to be addressed no matter how much we micromanage them, unless we were to go to the utter extreme of manually controlling each one, which we aren't going to be able to do. Dwarves are simply going to need to eventually learn that "Fire HOT!" whether or not we give them more autonomy.
In other words, if we are going to be speculating about how we want the direction of the game to go, we have to give Toady at least enough credit that he isn't incompetent, and that he will address some of the lingering problems eventually, especially if some of the workarounds for dwarven stupidity start becoming less workable, and it really becomes a game-stopping problem.
The economy, for one, is finally about to see some work put into it.
Hopefully, the soap and some of the other problems will see a little work put into them soon, as well.
Because of the Toady quote back on the second page (about not becoming Majesty, and having the assumption that actions were for survival), I have tried to put more thought into the way that the system would change over time.
Part of what I want to do with some of my suggestions is try to turn the game into less of a difficulty cliff, where survival of the first year or so is harsh and unforgiving, but beyond that point, it is smooth sailing.
In much the same way that baronies or the economy only applies at certain population milestones, the game could use a gradient system that gradually starts making dwarves more autonomous and less reliant upon your commands as time goes on, and your fortress becomes more complex and filled with dwarves.
As I see it, a cutoff point could be 20 civilian dwarves. Below that point, the fortress operates similarly to how it does now, with the assumption that every dwarf works for his own survival, and needs to keep his fellows alive so that the society as a whole can survive another day. (Civilian dwarves to make military fortresses with signfiicant military populations, and a probable player preference for direct control of military affairs not have to actually deal with much of this stuff. An init option to turn it all off, would, of course, also be welcome.)
After you have 20 civilian dwarves in a fort, the dwarves start to become more personalized. The lazy dwarves will start figuring that someone else can handle it, and work at their own leisure, assuming that if there's already 4 other miners in the fort, then having just ONE slack off shouldn't hurt the fortress too much, right? The workaholic dwarves would continue as they always had. This variable could be a function of population, with at or below 20 dwarves meaning the dwarves are comitted to survival, but a small, but ever-growing variable will make lazy dwarves slack off greater and greater periods of time as the population grows, up until it hits the point where they only work whenever they really feel like it, or their wallets are so empty that they just have to get some money to eat.
Likewise, if dwarves are given more leisure activities, and a demand to do them, then they will only demand these activities when there are enough dwarves in the fort, and the fort is well-enough established that they can honestly feel that their fort's existence is not under threat, and that a day of watching some goblin being fed to the elephants at the arenas would be a nice way to unwind after work.
The game would have a sliding scale of this autonomous time that dwarves have based upon the perceived threat to the fortress's existence - sudden drops in population would snap the autonomy back into "survival of the fortress" mode.
This would offer the player the ability to have the dwarves become more autonomous in their choices of activities, but only at points in the fortress when there are so many dwarves milling about in the fortress that you can't really manage to micromange each of them very well, anyway. It makes the game, instead, slide more towards managing the society of dwarves rather than individual dwarves, giving dwarves rewards for certain behaviors and disincentives for other behaviors when you have enough dwarves that maximum efficiency isn't necessary or perhaps even possible, and idlers can be left to figure out what jobs they might like to do, while players in small fortresses, potentially with big militaries that they directly micromanage, would have a greater direct control over their units.