wow you're really going off on this stuff eh?
Yes, I tend to feel strongly and overreact about some things. Especially when they are wrong and it is so obvious that they shouldn't be wrong in the first place. In case of Dwarf Therapist I respect your work on maintaining it, but not the decision to port the roles from dwarven guidance councillor and make them so important.
alright so first, turn off the role sorting in the roles tab and see if that helps.
I deselected "Include role ratings when sorting labour columns" and "Include role ratings when sorting skill columns" and it didn't help. Well, after changing the weights it works slightly better.
if you've got any suggestions for changes to the default roles, by all means let me know and i'll make adjustments.
Other than gutting it out completely because the system is inherently wrong and adjustments won't help much? Well, these are some ideas, but they will make comparing suitability to different roles impossible:
* For most civilian labours, like Masonry use just XP and skill rates, I've already given you the formula.
* For stone detailing creativity may be important, but not to me.
* For military I guess at least average physical stats and recuperation and disease resistance are important, but I just don't see a way of making a weighted average based on them. Different things are important to different people.
My way of doing this would be:
* Assume that using a skill gives constant amount of XP, regardless of stats and traits and sort
all skills and labours in grid view by XP and learning rates only.
* Include a sortable grid view with stats. (The one we have works for sorting, but not displaying stats.)
* Include a sortable grid view with traits. That way people can sort by helpfulness, choose a dutiful dwarf near the top of the list and make her the CMD.
Give warning to any tooltips with the roles that the values there are arbitrary and should not be relied upon.
what exactly is your problem with roles that makes them so bogus? is it the default weights? the calculations?
I already explained that you cannot just make a weighted arithmetic average out of skills and stats, because it is meaningless. Even if you could, the weights are unknown. For things like probability of a disease based on blood pressure, temperature, weight, age and so on you can use optimisation or data mining to find something that works, but here there doesn't seem to be any data, just people and their preferences. The entire way of thinking that lead to introducing these roles is fundamentally wrong and based on wrong assumptions. A dead give-away was that you wanted to include skill rates with a weight, instead of tying them with current level of skill, as they no longer matter after Legendary +5.
you can find dwarfs by preference by using the preference window and clicking on a preference.
Lol, this is kinda fun for jokes. I never explored that part of DT, because I never needed it for anything.